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Comment by stewbrew | Hacker News Reader

So you're ignoring that the [-function by design works differently for tibbles than for data frames. This isn't really a problem with tibble but with sloppiness in programming allowed by dynamic languages.

I personally think it's a good thing that the drop-argument defaults to FALSE for tibbles, since data frame's default drop = TRUE is a source of frequent bugs. The change of the default for this parameter is the source of your observation.

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I am not ignoring it, I am _highlighting_ it. The question of the comment above was "why would one prefer data.frame over tibble". I merely answered that question.

Yes, but the problem isn't tibble since what you're highlighting is a design choice and an argument in favor of tibble. The problem only arises when you're not aware of this design choice which is facilitated by sloppiness and dynmically typed languages.

One might ask whether it was a good idea that tibble enlists data.frame as an inherited class. Since a tibble obviously doesn't behave like a data frame, one could also argue that this is a mistake on part of the tibble developers but this is a different discussion.

All I am saying is that there are perfectly good reasons for not using tibbles if you do any kind of work outside of tidyverse. And you seem to agree?

As for whether or not tibbles should be data.frames - I posted a link to this exact discussion on R-dev mailing list within this thread, as an answer to a different poster. Here it is: https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-package-devel/2017q3/001896...

Ok, now I understand where you're coming from.

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