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I’ve seen R users swooning over the magrittr package for a while now, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of all these scary %>% symbols. Finally I had time for a closer look, and it seems potentially handy indeed. Here’s the idea and a simple toy example.

So, it can be confusing and messy to write (and read) functions from the inside out. This is especially true when functions take multiple arguments. Instead, magrittr lets you write (and read) functions from left to right.

Say you need to compute the LogSumExp function $\log\left(\sum_{i=1}^n\exp(x_i)\right)$, and you’d like your code to specify the logarithm base explicitly.

In base R, you might write
log(sum(exp(MyData)), exp(1))
But this is a bit of a mess to read. It takes a lot of parentheses-matching to see that the exp(1) is an argument to log and not to one of the other functions.

Instead, with magrittr, you program from left to right:
MyData %>% exp %>% sum %>% log(exp(1))
The pipe operator %>% takes output from the left and uses it as the first argument of input on the right. Now it’s very clear that the exp(1) is an argument to log.

There’s a lot more you can do with magrittr, but code with fewer nested parentheses is already a good selling point for me.

Apart from cleaning up your nested functions, this approach to programming might be helpful if you write a lot of JavaScript code, for example if you make D3.js visualizations. R’s magrittr pipe is similar in spirit to JavaScript’s method chaining, so it might make context-switching a little easier.