The Jumping Rivers folks have some good news for us:
The stability of the base packages is a great strength of the R ecosystem: both underpinning, and contrasting with, the rapid pace at which contributed packages (CRAN, BioConductor) evolve.
Imagine introducing a new feature into the R language. Even if problems arise with the usability of that feature, it would need to be maintained until at least the next major release, by which time thousands of developers and analysts may depend upon it. Unsurprisingly, the R maintainers are exceedingly cautious when introducing new syntax.
Similarly, you should employ caution when using new syntax in your own code. If you do use syntax that was introduced in R-4.1, be aware that your code will not run on versions of R that precede this. For example, this may prevent your new analysis scripts from running on your colleague’s computer, or prevent users from installing your new package.
Given how many third-party packages have regular breaking changes, I do wish more people would follow this advice.
Getting into the meat of things, I really like the F#-style pipe in R: |> makes a lot of intuitive sense, though I do wish they had included a placeholder element with the native pipe.