magrittr VS cells

R (yes, the statistics language) has exactly this.

You can literally extract the body of a function as a list of "call" objects (which are themselves just dressed-up lists of symbols), inject/delete/modify individual statements, and then re-cast your new list to a new function object.

I don't know why the original devs thought this was necessary or even desirable in a statistics package, but it turns out to be a lot of fun to program with. It has also made possible a wide variety of clever and elegant custom syntaxes, such as a pipe infix operator implemented as a 3rd-party library without any custom language extensions [0]. The pipe infix operator got so popular that it was eventually made part of the language core syntax in version 4.1 [1].

[0]: https://magrittr.tidyverse.org/

[1]: https://www.r-bloggers.com/2021/05/the-new-r-pipe/

In R (thanks to magrittr) you can now perform operations with a more functional piping syntax via %>%. This means that instead of coding this:

Try reading the documentation for magrittr.

Related note: the statistical programming language R has a library named magrittr to support the pipe operator.

About the pipe (%>%) symbol, it's provided by the magrittr package. The package documentation details how to use the pipe operator.

I was wondering what some good ways are to handle nested function calls without chaining them in long, ugly nested statements. I am looking for functionality similar to the pipe forward operator %>% in magrittr/R or |> in F#.

You may like R: https://magrittr.tidyverse.org

Agreed on everything else you said (especially the type safety stuff, it massively helps in production), but one correction: magrittr is absolutely in the tidyverse suite. It's not considered one of its "core" packages that it visibly tells you it loads, but magrittr is loaded when calling library(tidyverse) and development of the package is handled by the tidyverse team under their Github account: https://github.com/tidyverse/magrittr

Here is a project that you may be interested in: https://github.com/kennytilton/cells/wiki

For implementation in Common Lisp, I considered using something like Kenny Tilton's Cells.

The reactive programming idea reminded me of Ken Tilton and "Cells", which exploits the flexibility of CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System) to create a reactive programming language on top of Common Lisp.

https://github.com/kennytilton/cells

and he has slides from a talk

https://github.com/kennytilton/cells/blob/main/Lisp-NYC-2018...

to give context.

Nice post. Another way that uses cells.

See Kenny Tilton's Cells project, which more or less does the inverse.

https://github.com/kennytilton/cells

I saw Concat without returning a value and got excited that they had reinvented Prolog cause they obviously were going to run Concat backwards, but no, this is bad cells for webshits or something idk