An interesting thing to me about all these dplyr-style syntaxes is that Wickham thinks the group_by operator was a design mistake. In modern dplyr you can often specify a .by on an operation instead. I found switching to this style a pretty easy adjustment, and I think it’s a bit better. Example:

  d |> filter(id==max(id),.by=orderId)

I think PRQL were thinking a bit about ways to avoid a group_by operation and I think what they have is a kind of ‘scoped’ or ‘higher order’ group_by operation which takes your grouping keys and a pipeline and outputs a pipeline step that applies the inner pipeline to each group.

Given 10 more years dplyr syntax might resemble data.table's

My thoughts exactly, it even uses the same pipe syntax, though I do prefer `%>%`. I've been avoiding SQL for a while now as it feels so clunky next to the tidyverse