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Comment by d--b | Hacker News Reader

Hey Mike, glad you're doing a AMA. I have a few questions:

1. There is no great javascript library for manipulating data, like pandas for python. Are you interesting in starting one as part as a d3 module? This could benefit from d3 being a standard and from your experience in writing javascript code.

2. Do you regret the original .enter() .exit() functions? These were powerful, but were a barrier for entry because they were hard to grasp. Do you wish you'd gone full functional from the start?

3. How do you get paid? Are you sponsored? Are you looking for sponsors?

Thanks much for the great work!

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1. There’s room for improvement here. There’s some useful stuff in d3-array (https://github.com/d3/d3-array), particularly the nest and histogram operators. There’s also science.js (https://github.com/jasondavies/science.js). And UW’s datalib (https://vega.github.io/datalib/), which is partly a wrapper of d3-request, d3-dsv, d3-array and d3-random. New D3 modules or contributions would be welcome.

2. Not at all; I still think the data-join is a powerful concept for transforming the DOM based on data, and the new work on non-DOM D3 modules does not reflect a shift in my opinion. I’m simply decoupling D3 so that people can use the parts independently. I’m still developing the new d3-selection and d3-transition modules, and those will be released soon, but I’m saving them for last because I want to let the design “bake” to make sure I’m happy with it before release.

3. I am not currently paid (other than a buck or two I make off stickers). My wife is currently my de facto sponsor. ;) I’d like to find a way to make this financially sustainable, but I don’t know yet exactly what that will entail, and I’d like to get 4.0 released first.

Thanks for mentioning science.js, sounds promising. I might give a go at something that manipulates indexed data, like timeseries.

Re point 3: Please do thank your wife on behalf of the hackers community!

w/r/t #3 - I just did the same thing with Semantic UI and our 2.0 release. Took a year off after working at The New Republic, but kept a desk there to work on open source while receiving a modicum of donations from the community. Was a hard year but the quality of work that the freedom provided was worth it.

Perhaps you should consider a donate button in the docs for the time-being while you're going down this path with the project.

D3 Stickers link: https://www.stickermule.com/user/1070696243/stickers

Mike, your work never fails to inspire. The cubism slides (http://bost.ocks.org/mike/cubism/intro/#0) read like a revelation. It astounded me how much data you manage to beautifully convey.

Wes McKinney (author of pandas) built something like pandas for javascript as part of his (now aquired) startup datapad.io. I think he mentioned open sourcing it at some point, but he's probably too busy building Ibis at Cloudera now.

There are some basic table-like libraries, like datalib(https://github.com/vega/datalib) and datavore (https://github.com/uwdata/datavore), both from Jeff Heer's research group (which is where Mike first developed D3 as a grad student).

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