When not to use point-free style: Composed functions don’t always auto-vectorise well. As a consequence, we’re left with monsters such as this one. It might be worth investigating whether the function composition tools could be changed (transparently) to make auto-vectorisation more universal. In particular, the problem lies with `fapply`, which…

gistfile1.r

capitalize <-
      p(fapply, toupper %.% p(substring, 1, 1), p(substring, 2)) %|>%
      p(lapply, p(paste, collapse = '')) %|>% unlist

# versus

capitalize <- function (str) paste(toupper(substring(str, 1, 1)),
                                   substring(str, 2), sep = '')

# Usage (in both cases):

capitalize(c('abc', 'def')) # => 'Abc' 'Def'