lintr

Lintr Bot, lintr's Hester egg

Remember my blog post about automatic tools for improving R packages? One of these tools is Jim Hester’s lintr, a package that performs static code analysis. In my experience it mostly helps identifying too long code lines and missing space, although it’s a bit more involved than that. In any case, lintr helps you maintain good code style, and as mentioned in that now old post of mine, you can add a lintr unit test to your package which will ensure you don’t get lazy over time.

Now say your package has a lintr unit test and lives on GitHub. What happens if someone makes a pull request and writes looong code lines? Continuous integration builds will fail but not only that… The contributor will get to know Lintr Bot, lintr’s Hester (Easter) egg!

Automatic tools for improving R packages

On Tuesday I gave a talk at a meetup of the R users group of Barcelona. I got to choose the topic of my talk, and decided I’d like to expand a bit on a recent tweet of mine. There are tools that help you improve your R packages, some of them are not famous enough yet in my opinion, so I was happy to help spread the word! I published my slides online but thought that a blog post would be nice as well.