Plumbers, chains, and famous painters: The (updated) history of the pipe operator in R
Summary
This post traces the history of the pipe operator in R, from early community discussions to its standardization in base R as |> in 4.1.0. It covers key milestones (the magrittr %>% pipe, dplyr’s pipe, and wrapr/pipeR variants) and provides code examples showing how pipes transformed data manipulation workflows. The piece also discusses inline function notation and the practical differences between various pipe implementations.