Lionel Henry

Also known as L. Banziiaf Henry

Lionel Henry is a software engineer whose R packages, among them rlang, supply tidy evaluation and other low-level tools to the tidyverse. In 2016 he proposed new pipe syntax and wrote a patch for R, and in 2017 the tidy evaluation framework he helped build arrived in dplyr 0.6.0. He co-authored the 2019 tidyverse paper in the Journal of Open Source Software, rewrote magrittr in C for version 2.0 in 2020, and announced the Air formatter with Davis Vaughan in 2025. As of October 2026, he is a Senior Software Engineer at Posit, PBC and the author and maintainer of rlang.

Now at: Posit Software, PBC
Links: X and GitHub

Timeline

2016

A pipe patch for R

In 2016, he proposes new pipe syntax and writes a patch for R. Jim Hester presents the proposal to the R Core Team at the Directions in Statistical Computing Conference in 2017.
2017

Tidy evaluation in dplyr

Having recently joined Hadley Wickham's team, he contributes ideas that lead to a framework called tidy evaluation, introduced in dplyr 0.6.0 in 2017.
2018–2020

Teaching tidy evaluation

He works in the r-lib and tidyverse teams at RStudio. He gives a tidy evaluation webinar in February 2018, speaks on names and expressions in tidy eval code at rstudio::conf 2019, and speaks on interactivity and programming in the tidyverse at rstudio::conf 2020.
2019

Co-authoring the tidyverse paper

He is one of the authors of "Welcome to the Tidyverse", published in the Journal of Open Source Software in November 2019. Wickham counts over 16,000 citations of the paper.
2020

Rewriting magrittr in C

In November 2020, he announces magrittr 2.0, a rewrite in C of the package that provides the %>% pipe. The release resolves longstanding overhead and backtrace issues and makes the pipe more compatible with the base pipe |> coming in the next version of R.
2021–2022

Clearer errors and tidyselect 1.2.0

In December 2021, he previews the error style of rlang 1.0.0, the package that provides tidy evaluation and other low-level frameworks for the tidyverse. The new style shows errors as bulleted lists and includes the erroring function call by default. In October 2022, he and Hadley Wickham announce tidyselect 1.2.0, the low-level package behind column selection in tidyverse functions.
2024–2025

Positron and the Air formatter

In 2024, he is among the Posit developers who introduce Positron, a data science IDE for Python and R, at posit::conf 2024. In February 2025, he and Davis Vaughan announce Air, an extremely fast R formatter that the tidyverse team already uses in dplyr, tidyr and recipes.
As of October 2026

Maintaining rlang at Posit

As of October 2026, he is a Senior Software Engineer at Posit, PBC, and the author and maintainer of rlang. He maintains 13 CRAN packages, including rlang, lifecycle, withr, magrittr and tidyselect, and has had packages on CRAN since September 2015.