plot VS vega-lite

I love Vega(-lite) / Altair, the grammar of graphics plotting system is really great to build any kind of chart even when it wasn't thought through by the authors of the library. There are other wrappers for languages that lack viz libraries, such as Elixir / Livebook [0]

However, when I used it a couples years back it struggled with large vizs, I think due to Vega(-lite)'s way of embedding the data in the viz artifact.

Also, interactive is nice but often I just need a quick static plot, and matplotlib is more convenient for this, you can easily see the png in any environment etc.

These days I'm eager to see an Observable Plot [1] wrapper for Python !

[0] https://github.com/livebook-dev/vega_lite

[1] https://github.com/observablehq/plot

Good questions.

1. It’s just JavaScript so you can fetch stuff dynamically too (see https://observablehq.com/framework/lib/duckdb). But yeah, only client-side. (Though see https://github.com/observablehq/framework/issues/234.)

2. Sure, it’s all open source, I bet you could make that work. Or `yarn deploy` to Observable and configure sharing there (though it wouldn’t let you charge others).

3. Yup. Which is part of the appeal of model of running data loaders at build time: you can query some private data and viewers would only be able to see the final result set. (The lack of something like this has always been a huge problem for Observable notebooks. You’d make some great query-driven charts and then couldn’t make it public without some awkward manual dance of downloading and re-uploading a file to a fork of the notebook.)

4. I wish I knew! It’s being tracked here https://github.com/observablehq/plot/issues/1711. Lately there’s been a lot more work on Framework naturally but now that that’s out…

5. Another good question. We’re definitely interested in tailoring it more to this sort of use case but lots is TBD!

Observable Plot: A library built on top of D3.js used to visualize data and iterate more quickly on different plot chart

https://observablehq.com/

Observable Plot [0] is also nice. AFAIU it's the same library powering the visualizations within Observable itself.

[0] https://observablehq.com/plot/

I liked observablehq plot library: https://github.com/observablehq/plot

Box zoom would need to be added to Vega-Lite first, and there has been some discussion around it in https://github.com/vega/vega-lite/issues/4742. Bottom line is that there's nothing blocking its implementation, someone just needs to do the work in Vega-Lite. And once released in Vega-Lite, Altair would pick it up automatically with how we generate the Altair API from the Vega-Lite schema.

I also have difficulties with Gnuplot and Matplotlib. I like Vega that allows me to create visualisations in a declarative way. If I really need something special I go with d3.js, which had a really steep learning curve but with ChatGPT it should have become easier for beginners.

[1] https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

To ensure you do not miss this: LiveBook comes with a Vega Lite integration (https://livebook.dev/integrations -> https://livebook.dev/integrations/vega-lite/), which means you get access to a lot of visualisations out of the box, should you need that (https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/).

In the same "standing on giant's shoulders" stance, you can use Explorer (see example LiveBook at https://github.com/elixir-explorer/explorer/blob/main/notebo...), which leverages Polars (https://www.pola.rs), a very fast DataFrame library and now a company (https://www.pola.rs/posts/company-announcement/) with 4M$ seed.

Nice, would be nice to have it integrated in GitHub markdown.

Looks similar to Vega or Vega-lite(https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/). Definitely as rich as D3.js but gets the job done for simple visualisations.

Vega-lite can do this https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

The underlying data is from an online betting site. Data analysis was done in Python and I used Vega/Altair for the visualisation.

I have a bunch of data that I want to plot. I'm using lisp-stat, which is pretty good, for data frames and analysis. However, lisp-stat uses vega-lite for plotting and to put it mildly, vega-lite is fucking awful.

I wish the author all the best in developing his library; at the moment it seems quite incomplete, so if you want SVG charts today, I recommend Observable Plot[1] or Vega-Lite[2]

[1]: https://github.com/observablehq/plot

[2]: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/