Suggestion: move DataFrames, plotting into standard distribution

[nalimilan]

@davidanthoff

So this one is really, really tricky in julia. R has the whole parent.frame() story that makes it pretty easy to create the kind of interface that you see in dplry, but there is no equivalent in julia to that. I’ve been wrecking my brain about this issue for almost two years now, and I think if we are looking for anything even vaguely generic, we’ll have to prefix column names by something in these kind of packages. So in Query.jl that is _.foo right now in the standalone syntax. It would be nice if we could get rid of one more character, say something like ~foo instead, but of course ~ has some other meaning already and I don’t know whether we still have a character that would be used for this case.

I can’t find the discussions now, but I think this was discussed in DataFramesMeta. One possibility would be to assume variables refer to columns/fields by default, and use a special syntax to refer to variables. $x is a possible syntax, similar to string interpolation. Or are there technical problems with that approach?