I've wondered when an opinionated charting library would appear and gently guide people away from pie charts.
Apple dropped a couple of notches in my estimation when they brought out iWork and 3-D woodgrain pie-charts were proudly displayed.
Apple dropped a couple of notches in my estimation when they brought out iWork and 3-D woodgrain pie-charts were proudly displayed.
They are perfect for a very, very limited set of datasets: if you have a very large slice and a number of small slices and want to show the obvious difference.
In fact, IMO, bar charts (normally) have the far worse problem of being relative to the largest value. In a percentage situation, you want the size of the bars to be relative to the whole, otherwise its misleading to say the least...
So the take away fact is that all visualisations have weaknesses under certain conditions.
But to offer graphing library that does not offer pie charts is, well, a bit silly in my opinion.