[chenglong-hn]

Grammar of graphics has been the foundation of a lot of stuff and definitely worth learning for everyone!

A challenge with GoG is that it assumes configurations as second-class stuff, which makes it quite difficult for users to deal with things like changing formatter, scale, annotations. Flint kinda want to hide this aways (so Flint sets them on behalf of the agent or the user). But yeah, GoG is still the foundation for expressivenss.

[NicuCalcea]

Can you elaborate on what you mean? Why is it more difficult to deal with formatters, scales, annotations compared with other solutions? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the defaults are similar to what you would get in Flint, and if you want to add or customise anything, it's usually just one extra line. That's kind of the entire point of the grammar of graphics.

[chenglong-hn]

https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/

The "how it works" section explains a little bit of this. For example, for the heatmap example showing temporal data, for a "good-looking" chart, we need to (1) reconcile the conflict between banded discrete steps and continuous temporal axis, and it requires understanding and setting stepsize and time parser, (2) for the correlation color, we need to set domain etc under the color axis.

These are supposed to be handled automatically as system defaults, but the tricky part is that these decisions are "semantical", thus requires us to understand the data and design principles, thus existing languages won't stretch that far. And the actual good looking spec is actually over 40 lines of json spec with many low-level paramters, way beyond the simple 5 line encoding promised by GoG. Flint uses semantic type and a layout optimization algorithm to handle this, so 5 lines of encoding + data semantic types can derive rest parameters automatically.

Some examples in the gallery are more extreme: like the waterfall chart example is way over 100 lines of code, and sunbusrt, rose chart are even more since compositions are quite difficult in GoG.

Glad to have a discussion on this level! In fact, we wrote a paper about this, will be putting it online in a week or so!

[tihuan]

Thanks for the amazing work! How to follow up on reading the paper when available ?

[chenglong-hn]

We will link it on github and the project page!

https://github.com/microsoft/flint-chart