[mbostock]

See Leland Wilkinson’s The Grammar of Graphics. He describes the difference between a chart typology (a fixed set of chart types with a fixed set of configuration options) and a grammar of graphics (a set of orthogonal primitives that can be composed in arbitrary ways).

[Optimal_Persona]

Wilkinson inspired Hadley Wickham to articulate a Layered Grammar of Graphics embodied in his ggplot R visualization package.

https://vita.had.co.nz/papers/layered-grammar.html