Ihaka Lecture Series 2024 | Reimagining Literate Programming and Automated Report Generation

"I first came across Sweave in R around 2007 and immediately fell in love with it. Later I learned about the idea behind Sweave, literate programming, and found it quite interesting, too. Literate programming may not be very useful for programming, but is a perfect paradigm for automated report generation. That is, generating (data analysis) reports automatically from computer code. In 2011, I started developing the R package knitr to explore further the potential of literate programming, which achieved some success (especially with the invention of R Markdown), but when looking back after thirteen years, I couldn't believe that I missed some good ideas that should have been so obvious, and also implemented some ideas so awfully. In this lecture, I'll share some thoughts along the design of a reimagined report generator in R after gaining first-hand experience with R Markdown users in the industry in 2024. I'll also explain the philosophy and rationale behind some decisions when writing this software package." - Yihui Xie

Yihui Xie (https://yihui.org) is currently an independent consultant on R Markdown and R package development. Previously, he worked as a software engineer at Posit Software, PBC (formerly RStudio, PBC) from 2013 to 2023. He earned his PhD from the Department of Statistics, Iowa State University. As an active R user, he has authored several R packages, such as knitr, bookdown, blogdown, xaringan, animation, tinytex, and pagedown, among which the animation package won the 2009 John M. Chambers Statistical Software Award (ASA). He also co-authored a few other R packages, including shiny, rmarkdown, rticles, and leaflet. He has published five books related to R Markdown, including "Dynamic Documents with R and knitr", "R Markdown: The Definitive Guide", and "R Markdown Cookbook", etc.