When I'm teaching Pandas, the first thing we do after loading the data is inspect the types. Especially if the data is coming from a CSV. A few tricks can save 90+% of the memory usage for categorical data.
This should be a step in the right direction, but it will probably still require manually specifying types for CSVs.
Yeah, I expect most efforts to just help make the pain not as painful. And specifying the data types is not some impossible task and can also help with other things.
This should be a step in the right direction, but it will probably still require manually specifying types for CSVs.