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Comment by maximilianroos | Hacker News Reader

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maximilianroos·

This is great feedback, and I agree with you re de-prioritizing terseness.

And I agree with you on both the assignments and `split` being a bit awkward. Kusto just uses `by`, WDYT?

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Not the original commenter, but just using `by` makes total sense to me.

I've made this change [1]. Thank you!

[1] https://github.com/max-sixty/prql/commit/dde7fcfc13daaadbdce...

FWIW the separate `group_by()` is one of my greatest design regrets with dplyr — I wish I had made `by` a parameter of `summarise()`, `mutate()`, `filter()` etc.

Is it too deeply entrenched to change? The number of times I have had a data.frame grouped when it wasn't supposed to be, I can count on my fingers. But the hours that I spent trying to figure it out must amount to a paycheck or two.

There's a lot of dplyr code out there, and a lot of people who know most every part of the tidyverse by heart, making breaking changes like this so far into a frameworks life would cause a lot of unnecessary work in re-coding old code as well as requring people to re-learn syntax.

IMO for such a small adjustment the benefits don't outweight the costs.

Yeah, that's my current position. It's possible that we might be able to add it in optionally (by adding a new `.by` argument to summarise and friends), but just the analysis to determine how it would affect existing code is a lot of work.

Thanks for commenting! I hope you can see the influence of dplyr & tidyverse here. Please let me know if you have any other feedback!

Group by seems good enough and not changing terms where there isn’t good reason seems like a good goal. Is PRQL’s split the same as SQL’s group by?

Yes Kusto's `by` is excellent!

By actually sounds great to me to, yea. In this case it's short but it's extremely communicative!

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