Why You Should Forget 'for-loop' for Data Science Code and Embrace Vectorization

We all have used for-loops for majority of the tasks which needs an iteration over a long list of elements. I am sure almost everybody, who is reading this article, wrote their first code for matrix or vector multiplication using a for-loop back in high-school or college. For-loop has served programming community long and steady. However, it comes with some baggage and is often slow in execution when it comes to processing large data sets (many millions of records as in this age of Big Data). This is particularly true for interpreted language like Python, where, if the body of your loop is simple, the interpreter overhead of the loop itself can be a substantial amount of the overhead.