How a Stack Overflow question gave R its pipe operator

Plumbers, chains, and famous painters: The history of the pipe operator in R

The pipe operator in R, now a staple of data analysis, began in 2012 when an anonymous Stack Overflow user asked how to implement F#'s forward pipe. Ben Bolker answered with the first %>% function. Later, Stefan Bache created magrittr, naming it after René Magritte's painting 'The Treachery of Images.' The pipe evolved through dplyr's %.% and pipeR's %>>%, finally landing in base R 4.1.0 in May 2021 as |>, transforming how R users write code.