Delete a column from a Pandas DataFrame

To delete a column in a DataFrame, I can successfully use:
del df['column_name']


But why can't I use the following?
del df.column_name


Since it is possible to access the Series via df.column_name, I expected this to work.

As you've guessed, the right syntax is

del df['column_name']

It's difficult to make del df.column_name work simply as the result of syntactic limitations in Python. del df[name] gets translated to df.__delitem__(name) under the covers by Python.

Stack Overflow Q#13411544, score: 1337