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Weren't those functions moved to tidyr? Anyway they should be taken as a model for how to implement a sane interface for data reshaping in other languages. You can say what you want about R/Wickham, but he's not afraid to thinker with his modules until they find the perfect user experience

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true. and it used to be spread() and gather() and those were bad

Yes, the newer "pivot_wider" and "pivot_longer" are just much cleaner and nicer than the 25 different half-broken way you can use in pandas. Luckily I don't have to do a lot of data engineering anymore, because R is just not fun for large projects while pandas is very unergonomic

It sounds like in the past you’ve used pandas/python for this. Any opinions on the best option for pivoting with those tools?

I did and honestly both ways I tried (pivot and melt) looked disappointing compared to tidyr. I just don't like the reliance on indices (and the stateful API that comes with it) in many operations, like in pivot

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