magrittr VS scenebuilder

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

SceneBuilder, good luck!

Can't argue with that, but to me it seems that things have substantially deteriorated since desktop GUIs fell out of fashion. Maybe that tells you more about my age than about the state of the art, but in the 90's one could "learn" GUI programming in about 30min in a RAD tool by throwing controls in containers and implementing callback functions in "direct style" for the event (Qt , swing, Java/ScalaFX, Gtk, Forms, delphi, …), or do all that in code instead, with objects representing components and inheritance/OOP doing wonders to encapsulate state, expose a type-safe discoverable API, and offer customizability through members override. Entire generations of corporate monks made visually and functionally convincing business apps with VBA in an afternoon for instance.

Yes it does[1] and it works on Desktop, mobile and web.

JavaFX has SceneBuilder[2] which also fit the description but for some reason, it never caught on. Gluon seems to have that work not only on desktop, but also on mobile.

[1] https://docs.flutter.dev/development/tools/devtools/overview

[2] https://gluonhq.com/products/scene-builder/

JavaFX (Desktop) -> Use Scene Builder standalone from Gluon. https://gluonhq.com/products/scene-builder/

Additionally you can learn JavaFX for desktop applications. JavaFX with Gluon Scene Builder (https://gluonhq.com/products/scene-builder/ ).

SceneBuilder

Just run it from source until you figure it out