Observable Plot: a new JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization

github.com

3 pointstracyhenry2 comments

Beats writing 20 lines of D3 code to show a simple bar chart! It looks similar to Vega Lite API. One thing that annoyed me about Vega Lite is that it has it's own expression language rather than leveraging JavaScript. I know it's meant to be language agnostic but leveraging existing web technologies is what makes D3 so powerful.

Yeah, we at Observable love Vega-Lite (and Arquero etc). My coworker Ian wrote a great summary of how Plot relates to Vega-Lite here: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-vega-lite. Like you said, his first point is that Plot uses plain JavaScript functions instead of Vega Expressions.

Another difference is that Plot does more type inference, e.g. using d3.scaleUtc if the values are dates and d3.scaleLinear if not.

I wrote a similar notebook about Plot and D3, though the differences there may be more obvious: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-for-d3-users

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