Hacker News Reader

Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Kind of odd they didn't decide to go with the magrittr syntax, which is in common use and heavily promoted in dplyr / tidyverse.

I wonder if RStudio will change its `ctrl` + `shift` + m shortcut from the magrittr ( %>% ) style pipes to these new pipes ( |> )

View on HN

I'm sure they wanted to not replace magrittr pipes. R is introspective, and some reckless people (like myself) will mess with functions' guts in a few scripts. Replacing the `%>%` function with a syntax symbol will break those scripts. Even with scripts that don't metaphorically shove their hands down the garbage disposal, programmers might've relied on certain behaviors of the magrittr pipe.

The R Core team is very cautious about breaking anything, including universally acknowledged terrible defaults (I never thought `stringsAsFactors = TRUE` would ever go away). They know the majority of R programmers are not experts in programming. These users just want to write a script, debug it, and then use it for years with complete trust in the results.

It seems to have been worth the caution. R has a great reputation for stability. The contrast between my experiences in R and python datascience tools is stark. Pandas syntax has changed wildly since I started learning it, but R and tidyverse hasn’t really changed at all. Admittedly pandas was in rapid and early development at the time.

I think the R reputation for stability is entirely driven by CRAN. If your package doesn't build on the latest version of R, it is marked unavailable. This means that people can build on R-current, in a way that simply isn't possible with the state of python packaging.

Maybe Python just needs a bigger repository with more stringent rules for what will be allowed?

CRAN is definitely one of the best "features" of R. A very strict and official repository that requires human approval. Most often, that human is part of or close to the R Core team. Most guides I've read for getting a package on CRAN have to mention not wasting the time of somebody who's likely a busy statistics professor.

Isn't the reason that magrittr was able to use that syntax that it already existed, so your proposal is a breaking change?

I thought %% was some sort of macro expansions and that is how magrittr creates pipes. But browsing through the magrittr github repo, it looks like they just define %>% and the other pipes as functions [1].

I don't actually know the relation between magrittr and the RStudio shortcut, but I've always assumed a shortcut for typing the pipe characters exist because RStudio employs Hadley Wichkham, who in turn is really big on tidyverse and pipes.

Would %>% mean anything in R if you didn't import magrittr?

[1] https://github.com/tidyverse/magrittr/blob/8b3d510f2a333b224...

All %fun% constructs are just simple functions that can be created by the user and can be used as infix operators. Base R has a few of those: %in%, %o%, %*%, %x%, %%, %/%.

magrittr created %>% which, when used in infix: x %>% f() calls the function on the right side with the argument on the left side f(x).

There are package that provide tons more. For example: https://github.com/moodymudskipper/inops . And you can easily create your own:

    `%sum%` <- function(x, y) x + y

    1 %sum% 2
    [1] 3

To define a new binary operator in R (which are just functions), it must be between % characters.

%>% does not mean anything in base R.

You can't do that if you wanted it to be a symbol of its own. The use of wrapping "%" is native functionality so making `%>%` into a symbol would break the consistency of that.

I'm pretty happy that they didn't, because silently replacing one operation with a similar operation that inevitably has different bugs and different ways of handling edge cases would be pretty frustrating. Letting both live side-by-side as people transition would be my preference.

argh. and here I've been typing %>%. thanks!!!

also just discovered that ctrl shift m in firefox does something weird, looks like mobile view or something..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com