Plost – a deceptively simple plotting library | Hacker News Reader

Plost – a deceptively simple plotting library

github.com

80 pointsgrogu8822 comments

What you need 99% of the time is insanely easy

The other 1% is impossible. Use Vega-Lite instead!

I really like that as a preemptive strike against the leaky abstraction crowd.

My general complaint as a distinguished member of the leaky abstraction crowd is not that abstractions can be leaky, but rather that they are sold as if they weren't... with creators being so willing to ignore from how many places their abstractions leak.

This is not the case here. It clearly says: "we can deal with the simple cases nicely! but no promises beyond that!". It's fair.

My core argument is that tools do not solve problems, they transform them, and you can't trust a tool that doesn't acknowledge that. This one is saying it transforms the common cases into simple ones.

About that streamlit. On Firefox for Android it doesn't work and displays a "Oh no" error message. I checked other streamlit examples from the streamlit front page and they worked. So yours is broken somehow.

Argh I was making some changes and messed things up. Sorry about that.

As a plotting library, I think that the README would deserve to have at least a representative plot example.

Check out the example app, linked in the README. I meant for that to be a replacement for the README, since it actually lets you interact with the plots.

But I'll add a picture to GitHub anyway

Looks like the app is dead :/

It would deserve a simple README..not linked elsewhere, which already broke up.

What is the difference to https://altair-viz.github.io/ which I use in Python to create vega-lite plots? Can you create interactivity with Plost? Unfortunately https://share.streamlit.io/tvst/plost is still broken, so I can't really assess this.

Not OP, but the API looks slightly dense/shorter/brief, which might appeal some people.

I use Altair too, and initially felt the API very verbose compared to, say, matplotlib (for simpler plots). So I kind of see the possible appeal. But I now appreciate the grammar-of-graphics like composable nature of Altair API. And yeah, the interactivity is nice.

Oh hey, fancy seeing this here! I'm the author

I'll try to answer questions below.

Nice work on this library! Hadn’t come across it before. I’ve been using Streamlit quite a bit the last few months and really enjoy it. Have a few ideas in mind for incorporating plost after going through the sample app and seeing the event plots!

So much more convenient to use over writing verbose Vega-Lite / Altair. Wow, great job on this library!

Readme on streamlit, which says:

Oh no. Error running app. If this keeps happening, please contact support.

Looks useful. Vega-Lite is TypeScript (?), how does that distribute/integrate with Plost in python?

This is a library for use in Streamlit (which is a Python framework for data apps), and Streamlit already supports Vega-Lite behind the scene. So I'm just riding on their Vega-Lite.

Here's more info about Streamlit: https://streamlit.io

(BTW I'm a cofounder there :) )

Thanks, I had never run across Streamlit, which looks very mature. I'll try out Plost.

Learning another plotting library is the last thing I want in the world.

Look at their examples though, it's actually simple enough there doesn't seem to be much of anything to learn: https://share.streamlit.io/tvst/plost

Naturally, it's already dead. Yeah, what did I even expect… So, how many people is it really — HN front-page with 52 upvotes?

Seems similar to plotly / plotly express?

Plotly Express author here: yes, seems very similar! I approve! I've been toying with the idea of building what I had been calling "Vega Express" for a while, but now it looks like I don't need to ;)

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