tidyr VS mech

This was fun to play around with. I made some very minor changes and posted at https://gist.github.com/hadley/d54895557fbb0fe0402d2277b9011....

It revealed to me that there's a buglet in `forcats::last()` (https://github.com/tidyverse/forcats/issues/303) and made me wonder if `pivot_longer()` should be able to rename the columns as you pivot them (https://github.com/tidyverse/tidyr/issues/1338)

I originally wrote tidytable because dtplyr was missing a lot of functionality my coworkers and I needed, and at the time dtplyr looked like a "forgotten package" (lots of open issues/bugs, very infrequent updates). Hadley Wickham also mentioned at one point [he had no plans for adding tidyr functions)[https://github.com/tidyverse/tidyr/issues/1015#issuecomment-682977139]. He changed his mind on that one - tidyr functions are the ones that I'm in the process of contributing to dtplyr now.

There's also https://github.com/mech-lang/mech which is a sort of descendant of Eve https://witheve.com/ . That too seems to be getting close to hiatus. It's a bit of a shame since it seems like quite a nice paradigm for some stuff like GUIs, interactive stuff, and discrete event simulation, but I suppose the paradigm is both a bit obscure and different enough from everything else that it becomes a "boil the ocean" situation where one or a few people try and hack away but aren't really able to get much traction and eventually tired themselves out.

You should take a look at the language I’m developing, Mech: https://github.com/mech-lang/mech

I'm working on a language called Mech (github.com/mech-lang/mech) that is semantically parallel and asynchronous first. You can write something like this:

Hi everyone. I've posted here a couple times about my language Mech, which you can find here. I've just put together an update which I hope this community will find interesting!

> HN readers - do you have an "up and coming" language that you think has better structured the fundamentals from R, that you hope will someday have enough capabilities you can use it instead of R?

Hope is the operative word here!

I'm writing a language to compete in this area. It's called Mech and I'll be releasing the first beta in October. You can think of it like Matlab + Excel. It's very fast, has default-parallel semantics for operators and functions, and supports full interactive coding with no startup/compilation latency issues. It's meant for robots, but I've also designed it to be a better Matlab, and I think it should take on R handily. Fair warning, it's public alpha now so error messages are sparse and the happy path is narrow.

https://github.com/mech-lang/mech