Recently I have been spending time reading the draft chapters in the 2nd Edition Advanced-R book by Hadley Wickham – specifically the chapters about Expressions, Quotation, Evaluation, and Domain-Specific Languages. These chapters accompany new quasi-quotation and tidy evaluation tools provided in the rlang package. I am really excited about these tools. I think they will be very general and powerful tools for programming with dplyr and shiny, making higher-order functions, and I am excited to try out domain-specific language techniques. I have also read some skepticism about them being too complicated or difficult to understand, and so I wanted to make my own attempt to show why they are worth learning.
- This post is an introduction to the series (so I can eliminate throat-clearing from the posts)
- If you are having trouble picturing what is going on, I tried to develop an Analogy for Quasi-Quotation that might help with a mental model
- If you are just looking to accomplish something, I wrote down some Quasi-Quotation Applications
About Me:
As a caveat, I am no expert in these tools. I’ve been using R for 2 years, but haven’t written lots of functions using these quotatino tools or anything. I have taught myself a lot about them in writing these posts, in fact! If you want the authoritative version, check out the vignette on programming in dplyr and Advanced-R.
Who Quasi-Quotation is For:
There has been discussion about whether quasi-quotation and tidy evaluation tools are more for package authors than they are for people just trying to do some data wrangling. For me, understanding quasi-quotation has corresponded to a deeper understanding of how R works. This has been fun and valuable for me. That said, I understand that some people aren’t interested in that. I would recommend learning quasi-quotation to people who are already very comfortable writing functions and using higher-order functions like the apply and purrr::map families of functions. I think quasi-quotation tools have some similar features to higher-order functions (although more general).
Something Old, Something New:
I come to all of this through the tidyverse and the Advanced-R book. But R has always had quotation and meta-programming tools. I am unqualified to do a full comparison. For example, I’m not sure if base R has quasi-quotation features. I think that tidy evaluation with rlang provides something new, but again there are analogies to lisp and to the past. One big improvement in the R language versus S was giving R functions lexical scoping (see here). I’m no expert, but it looks to me like rlang::eval_tidy gives R expressions (really quosures) lexical scoping as well.