In general, the code philosophy behind ggplot2 and related tools (the so-called "tidyverse" in R) embraces functional programming, in particular doing computation by pure composition of smaller computations.
Using the "+" operator to denote composing parts of visualizations is not the greatest syntax but I think we're basically stuck with it for a bit due to historical baggage. See this note from the creator of ggplot, Hadley Wickham: https://community.rstudio.com/t/why-cant-ggplot2-use/4372/7
Using the "+" operator to denote composing parts of visualizations is not the greatest syntax but I think we're basically stuck with it for a bit due to historical baggage. See this note from the creator of ggplot, Hadley Wickham: https://community.rstudio.com/t/why-cant-ggplot2-use/4372/7