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by gumballhead 2984 days ago
I guess I'm one of those people who thinks that d3's api is an amazing level of abstraction. It took a bit for it to click for me, but that was mostly because it was my first exposure to functional programming.

If I ever have to make a chart with another language, I cry because I can't use d3. I have reimplemented portions of d3's api in other environments like native Android before. Digging through the docs to find whatever configuration variable I'm supposed to set reminds me of the days of jquery plugins.
2 comments
gumballhead 2984 days ago
I will say though that it's been a side-project idea of mine for several years now to build a JSX-like templating language that would generate d3 code. Never got around to it.
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curiousgal 2983 days ago
Can you point me to some resources that can help me with D3?
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gumballhead 2983 days ago
I'd be happy to. Can I ask first what you've tried and what you had trouble with? I think a lot of why d3 is considered low-level is that there are lot of external things you do need to know. For example, for me, it wasn't d3 itself but functional programming that I didn't really understand. For those who don't do web development much, it might be DOM (and in particular, SVG) manipulation.

The d3 specific parts are the idea of mapping data to DOM elements (which is the part I think is beautiful), how it uses the data join to do so, and how you use the scale functions to map from data space to pixel space to set the element positions and other attributes.

Feel free to email me if you like -- it's on my profile.

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