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Comment by ihuman | Hacker News Reader

How is D3.js these days? I last tried to use it 4 years ago for a side project, and ended up using C3.js instead (its a D3 wrapper). Since then, I haven't followed either library's development.

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I think I should have written more about this in the blog post. Creating data viz with d3.js is basically as low level as it's going to get for drawing charts in the browser. There are many higher level libs (most of which utilize d3.js functions) that make it easier, at the expense of customizability. For anyone who just wants a standard chart, there are tons of awesome libraries out there.

D3.js hasn't changed radically in the past ~8 years, mostly because it doesn't need to. The SVG API has been fairly stable (at least as far as what has been implemented across browsers), and the basics of visualizing data are static (eg. how to convert data values to physical values using scales.

We used c3. But switched to Vega-lite. It is another wrapper on D3 but it’s well thought out and the defaults are really good. It has university backing. We vega lite for our web based software (it reminds me of R’s ggplot2)

https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/

They have a python graphing lib too based on the same “grammar of graphics”

https://altair-viz.github.io/

+1 vega-lite and altair

The interactive crossfilter part in particular

https://altair-viz.github.io/user_guide/interactions.html

https://vega.github.io/vega-lite/examples/interactive_seattl...

I think there are two things you need to know, the basic model of d3 (.enter() and all that) and to make use of the example code online you need to have a good intuition for how to translate from v3 to the current version.

Once you know those two things, I consider it unmatched for creating unique visualizations, particularly interactive ones.

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