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Comment by RosanaAnaDana | Hacker News Reader

I think he's almost certainly speaking of the %>% group_by convention that is basically demanded of within the tidyworld.

I load magrittr and ggplot and toss the rest out. Right to left reading order is all I really want from that world. Data tables are such a superior convention to tibbles that it's not even funny (I need a tibbles like I need another hole in the head).

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But base r already has split() which does the same thing, turns a dataframe into a list of dataframe divided by values of a column. With the base r pipe operator and base functions like subset, aggregate, transform, split, you can basically replicate that convention while loading exactly no tidyverse packages. You can also use group_by(data, column) without a pipe if wanting to smuggle in a specific dplyr function.

What is wrong with tibbles?

They are not data.tables and sometimes I prefer working with data.tables.

Their print method annoys me and I don't like the benevolent paternalism of attempting to prevent you from modifying indexes of the dataframe.

I was (wrongly) guessing performance. Tibbles are ok for smaller data sets where data transformations don’t need to be in place and there’s no risk of running out of RAM. Data tables perform better, at the cost of what I think is a less ergonomic interface. See benchmarks here (compare data.table with dplyr):

https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

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