13. Iterating with purrr
R has numerous ways to iterate over the elements of a list (or vector), and Hadley Wickham aimed to improve on and standardize that experience with the purrr package. R has its roots in functional programming, and purrr is designed to utilize that computing paradigm. For our purposes, functional programming is when a function depends only on its input arguments. This enables us to iterate over a list and apply a function to each element independently. This is mainly aimed at operating on lists, though it can also be used to apply non-vectorized functions to vectors.
The name purrr has many meanings. It is primarily meant to convey that this package enforces pure programming. It is also a pun on a cat purring and has five ...
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