For the record, the original example is from the homepage of magrittr (I found it here https://www.fromthebottomoftheheap.net/2015/06/03/my-aversion-to-pipes/ h

For the record, the original example is from the homepage of magrittr (I found it here https://www.fromthebottomoftheheap.net/2015/06/03/my-aversion-to-pipes/ https://www.fromthebottomoftheheap.net/2015/06/03/my-aversio...) and I'm not trying to angle towards anywhere. I only wanted to point out that the version with a sequence of assignments is not so painful to read (to me) and even the nested version is readable and has some advantages. Not that anyone cares, but I think I would have written something like: df <- rbind(read.csv('/path/to/data/file1.csv'), read.csv('/path/to/data/file2.csv')) df <- df[, df$variable_a > x] df$variable_c <- df$variable_a / df$variable_b or maybe: df <- subset(rbind(read.csv('/path/to/data/file1.csv'), read.csv('/path/to/data/file2.csv')), variable_a > x) df[,”variable_c”] <- df[,”variable_a”] / df[,”variable_b”] Whether you think these are badly written pipes or not pipes at all, I don't care. It's good enough for me.