The core of the problem is that the tidyverse is trying to turn R into a user-friendly real-time calculator, rather than a tool for stable, deterministic, and literate data analysis.

"The real problem with this package is that it makes things easy, instead of hard"

That’s a rather glib interpretation of what I said.

I’m being rather charitable when I call the tidyverse “user-friendly”. That might be the goal of tidyverse devs, but it hasn’t been the reality since inception.

The point is even if we assume it is or will eventually become user-friendly, are we willing to accept the trade-offs that come with that?

I think the users have clearly delivered the verdict that it is friendlier than base R. Admittedly a low bar. Non R users, which do you prefer:

    foo[foo$bar == “baz”,]

    foo |> filter(bar == “baz”)

?

The first one by a mile.

Is this a joke?