John Mount covers a change in tidyr which mimics Mount and Nina Zumel’s pivot_to_rowrecs and unpivot_to_blocks functions in the cdata package:
If you want to work in the above way we suggest giving our
cdatapackage a try. We named the functionspivot_to_rowrecsandunpivot_to_blocks. The idea was: by emphasizing the record structure one might eventually internalize what the transforms are doing. On the way to that we have a lot of documentation and tutorials.
This is your regular reminder that the Tidyverse is very useful, but it is not the entirety of R.