[PaulHoule]

I never enjoyed making graphs with most APIs whether it was products like Matlab and IDL or xvgr, not to mention pyplot, highcharts, etc.

I was initially apprehensive about making plots with D3.js but once I got over the hump it was such a breath of fresh air. Instead of the usual second guessing, head scratching and "you can't get here from there" it was just... easy! Want bar charts by date where the weekends are a different color... easy!

I'd also point out the endless complaining people have about things like puppet, terraform, kube files and such. I always found that building out cloud infrastructure with Java or Python programs that use the AWS/Azure API and write bash scripts that boot up on the machines or Python programs was... Easy! Often I'd have complicated systems up-and-running and checked into git while people were still fighting with leaking abstractions with various value-subtracting tools that never absolve you from knowing bash.

[epgui]

What you need is a system that implements some Grammar of Graphics (Leland Wilkinson, 2000; sometimes abbreviated "GoG" or "GG"), like ggplot2, vega, or something like that. Although I'm a bit weary of systems that have "their own version" of Wilkinson's GoG but that don't necessarily have the same rigorous correctness proofs.

D3 is awesome but not trivial: I consider it a more low-level tool than any GoG.

[PaulHoule]

no fan of ggplot2, one of the few ‘higher level’ libs i do like is seaborne as it has some actual wisdom baked in.

i think one d3.js succeeds so well because it treats scales as functions, which is what they really are. as such it gives you the tools to implement ‘grammar of graphics’. Also it is giving you full control of the attributes of svg and other objects and puts them at the service of the GoG viewpoint as opposed to offering you declarative access to an impoverished and inevitably flawed toolbox.

[epgui]

Yeah, even though GoG was designed and is usually (or always? is there a counter-example?) implemented with the OOP paradigm, I've always found that its principles were better abstracted with functions and combinators. It's a product of its time.

I believe the original GoG theory/specification does not suffer from the same impoverishment and flaws, it having been formally proven and all... But the same cannot be said of any particular implementation "merely inspired by it". I would very much like to implement it in a pure FP language like haskell (and/or perhaps even proven correct with Coq) some day, that would be fun.

Myself, I think ggplot2 is one of the more solid and least-crippled implementations. Unfortunately, my distaste for the R language is such that I hope I never have to use it again.