I'm currently writing some content for new R users and want to address the general paradigm that first argument of tidyverse functions is a tbl
which supports the use of the pipe.
One thing I've noticed is that there seems to be quite a bit of variation in the naming convention of this first argument. I am wondering if there is some philosophy underlying this.
For example within {dplyr} select()
, filter()
, mutate()
use the argument name .data
.
Whereas many of the suffixed versions of the verbs use .tbl
—i.e. select_*()
, arrange_*()
, summarise_*()
. Additionally, tally()
and count()
take the argument name x
.
Looking at {tidyr} pivot_wider()
and pivot_longer()
use the argument name data
, hoist()
and the unnests use data
.
Are these argument names just indicative of when the functions were written and perhaps possibly the author and I'm looking too hard for consistency and pattern?