py4cl2 VS vega-lite

I... recently got that working: https://github.com/digikar99/py4cl2/tree/master/cffi - Yes, CFFI! Yes, passing CL array data by reference!

I ended up using a fair bit of matplotlib through college and with colleagues. I too don't want to use python, but I also don't like throwing away its libraries, and I'm too lazy to invest in other* plotting ecosystems. In effect, I use up using matplotlib through py4cl/2.

Note that it is not my aim to replace the python ecosystem; I think that is far too lofy a goal to be of any good. My original intention was to interoperate with python through py4cl/2 or the likes, but felt that one needs a Common Lisp library for "small" operations, while "large" operations can be offloaded to python libraries through py4cl/2.

Python: Blender and Panda3D (game engine used for Disney's Toontown way back when) are both scriptable with Python. I've been able to successfully call Panda from Py4CL2 (thanks digikar for the help with that), but I have not tried with Blender yet. I think it's doable.

While you are at it I may as well mention https://github.com/digikar99/py4cl2

If performance is absolutely not a concern, then third option is using python libraries through py4cl/2. To put it differently, if calling python from lisp is not the bottleneck, then this is a feasible option.

py4cl2 (not py4cl!) author here. From the v2.9.0 docs:

py4cl and py4cl2 represent a fairly pragmatic example of method 1, using an OS child process to communicate back and forth with your python code. Python is fairly popular and well-enabled with libraries, so you can delegate things to python that leverage those libraries.

If you can structure your code so that data de/serialization is not a bottleneck, then you could access the python libraries using py4cl/2.

I like Vega-Lite: https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

It’s built by folks from the same lab as D3, but designed as “a higher-level visual specification language on top of D3” [https://vega.github.io/vega/about/vega-and-d3/]

My favorite way to prototype a dashboard is to use Streamlit to lay things out and serve it and then use Altair [https://altair-viz.github.io/] to generate the Vega-Lite plots in Python. Then if you need to move to something besides Python to productionize, you can produce the same Vega-Lite definitions using the framework of your choice.

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.