styler

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!