altair

If you can write visualisations in Python itself, I am a big fan of Altair's syntax (https://github.com/altair-viz/altair), which is based on vega-lite. A while back, I wrote a brief guide and comparison of the main plotting libraries: https://datapane.com/reports/87NNEJ7/the-ultimate-guide-to-p... One benefit of having them in actual code is that you can programmatically automate the creation of things like dashboards and reports. For instance, schedule a script to share an interactive plot every Monday morning, or build a live dashboard that updates every 10m. This opens up a lot of possibilities that would be impossible in a traditional drag-and-drop tool.

> Finally I'm not really sure of the point of being declarative if it only supports JavaScript anyway. Maybe they plan a WASM implementation? Vega schemas are JSON and JSON is quite portable, despite its JS origins. Vega has actually become fairly popular in the Clojure ecosystem (see e.g. https://github.com/metasoarous/oz) due to how well the data-orientation fits the Clojure philosophy. I also think Altair for Python is quite popular (https://github.com/altair-viz/altair) and that is a Vega-lite library.

Hi Hacker News! One of the Vega-Lite authors here. I'm excited to see you all here checking out our declarative visualization system. If you want to learn more about the academic origins, check out the paper: https://idl.cs.washington.edu/papers/vega-lite. Vega-Lite is also available as the default plotting library in JupyterLab. If you like, also check out Altair (https://github.com/altair-viz/altair), a Python API for generating Vega-Lite and Vega-Lite-API (https://observablehq.com/@uwdata/introduction-to-vega-lite), a JavaScript API to generate Vega-Lite.

See also: Altair (Python library for generating Vega-Lite) https://github.com/altair-viz/altair Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411859

I've been interested in Altair ever since I saw this blog post comparing it to other Python libraries a couple years back: https://dsaber.com/2016/10/02/a-dramatic-tour-through-python... At that time (Fall 2016), Altair was at v1.2. Version 1.2.1 hit a full year later. And v2.0 apparently landed just last month: https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/releases

It's been updated (with labels and data source from Wiki) and the author would like to have it pop up the name of the GPU when you mouseover too. Filed an issue: https://github.com/altair-viz/altair/issues/360

Having spent lots of time recently looking at vis in both Python and R (I use both), I'm starting to think Vega lite may well be the future. In Python, you can use Altair [0] and in R you can use the vegalite package [1]. Note also that R's ggvis uses vega under the hood. [0] https://github.com/altair-viz/altair [1] https://github.com/hrbrmstr/vegalite