# dplyr

13 Hacker News commenters recommended dplyr and 0 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** People recommend dplyr for its readable verb-based syntax for filtering, selecting and transforming data, especially for beginners learning data analysis in R.

## Why people recommend it

- Readable, almost pseudocode-like syntax (2 comments): "dplyr reads almost like pseudocode: take this dataset, select the columns that start with "bill"" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507896)) "Tools like Polars and dplyr and even SQL require code that's far closer to how people think." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50028971))
- Easy for beginners to learn (3 comments): "R and dplyrs ability to pass column names as unquoted objects actually reduces cognitive load for new people" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47510915)) "dplyr still offers the most simple and understandable introduction to data analysis for the beginner" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49548863)) "Dplyr is great if you are learning the ropes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46051441))
- Intuitive and elegant data manipulation (2 comments): "Unlike others, I find tidyverse (especially ggplot2 and dplyr, which reminds me a lot of pandas) to be quite intuitive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48669788)) "tools like polars and dplyr are such elegant ways to manipulate data" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49547723))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [tidyverse](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tidyverse.md): 23 recommend
- [data.table](https://hackerapproved.com/p/data-table.md): 15 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "dplyr", https://hackerapproved.com/p/dplyr/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).