I don’t think your point about dplyr holds weight because it explicitly draws inspiration from two base R functions: subset and transform. And I don’t think gg

I don’t think your point about dplyr holds weight because it explicitly draws inspiration from two base R functions: subset and transform. And I don’t think ggplot2 is a great example either since it’s some of my earliest work and I’m actively moving away from that style of API to something based on regular function composition. I wish someone would make this argument more precise so I could better understand it. From my perspective (apart from the pipe) I’m just taking ideas already seen elsewhere in R and trying to express them as cleanly and elegantly as possible. (I hope your point isn’t that R is fundamentally ugly and anything that makes it more elegant is hence unlike R like)