Abstract

Metaprogramming is when a computer program has the ability to treat programs as their data, enabling them to read or generate code, or even modify itself while running. It’s a technique that became popular with the programming language Lisp, from which R inherits many ideas.

In this talk, I dive into the inner workings of R and look at how the code you write is represented by the interpreter, give an overview of the tools available in the package rlang, and show off some common usecases in a tidyverse framework.