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Comment by gaws | Hacker News Reader

Plot and Framework are locked into the Observable ecosystem, which has its own learning curve. Learning D3 offers the best flexibility and control.

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In what way are these free open-source tools “locked-in” to Observable? Observable Plot is a vanilla JavaScript library that is released under the ISC license and can be used with any style of web development (e.g., React, Svelte, whatever). And likewise Observable Framework is released under the ISC license and you’re able to self-host projects anywhere and develop locally?

Mike, thank you for D3. It’s had a huge impact on me personally.

D3 for me is feature complete. Has been that way for me for years (maybe since v3).

Never had a problem, never felt the need to upgrade. Still have a bunch of stuff that just works.

Thank you for your effort.

Can you add the library as a html link.

Anything else would be unwise to invest time in learning.

Yes? Examples here: https://observablehq.com/plot/getting-started

Plot isn't locked into the Observable ecosystem at all - it's a JavaScript library that you can use independently of everything else there.

I'll ignore the part where you're wrong about the lock-in, but to the rest of what you said...

Yes? I guess I didn't think it needed to be said so explicitly, but if you are opting into Plot and Framework, you are accepting convention over configuration as they say.

And for some situations, that is what you want.

If you value flexibility and control above all else, then I agree they may not be for you.

But if you value other things, like speed of iteration, or just getting some good data visualizations built without a deep investment in learning underlying concepts, then Plot and/or Framework have definite advantages over doing it all with D3.

This is like saying that a computer without an operating system offers the best flexibility, or that a pile of sand is more flexible than an assembled computer.

D3 is not an empty computer. It's a high level library built in a high level language that runs in a browser. You are very very very far away from "metal". Being able to do something in a few clicks or little typing is nice until you need to do something more complicated. Sometimes it's worth actually learning how something basically works. Sometimes it isn't, it's everybody's choice.

So D3 is not what I’d consider a high-level library. The point of it is to be able to do all kinds of stuff not supported by your average charting solution’s out of the box histograms and whatnot. It’s a great way to make more bespoke visualizations.

Of course sometimes you just want to make a damn histogram without reinventing the wheel which is where some of the niceties discussed above come in.

D3 runs in the browser and it manipulates DOM nodes, a very high level abstraction. You can accomplish something with it using SVG, which is again a high level abstraction. You can give it data and it will spit out numbers that you can use to draw something on the screen. You can bind that data to elements and it will keep track of what's entering and what's exiting. You can apply fancy transitions with a line of code! You can make it change an appearance of e.g. a graph by changing the interpolation method. And so on.

Sure you have to write code, but it does a lot of things in the background that would take you s lot longer to do yourself. High level is not just "here's a library on top of D3 that you just give data to and you're done, but then you have to cry for days because you need to do something it didn't think of - 80% of use cases". When I used it I didn't get it, but then I took some time, a couple days, to actually understand it and I got a lot more productive. It's a great feeling when instead of thinking in workarounds for a missing configuration option you can think in solutions for the actual task. A lot quicker and more rewarding.

I didn't do much computer graphics in my life, some mandatory university classes, but I'd say doing it on the simplest beginner level it was a much different experience.

Fair enough. I meant specifically in the context of data visualization libraries, having done a fair bit of that sort of work in my own career. It’s harder to make a basic chart in d3, compared to many out of the box solutions, but it’s possible to do pretty much whatever you want, thanks to (what I consider) the low-ish level of abstraction it provides. I.e. DOM manipulation vs direct specification of standard chart attributes.

D3 is low level for doing what it does. Visualizing data.

It’s hard to think of a lower level abstraction for that purpose.

I've used D3 in nodejs to generate a png. Is it really that different than using something like Python or Java to do the same?

I might have confused your point, but if your goal is to build charts for data analysis, or exploratory data analysis, then D3 is considered low-level for the purpose of getting to the analysis fast.

Yeah, I can say from experience of D3 at least, it's very far from locked in. In fact I would ask what library you're thinking of could be less.

The community also has helped with some bizarre integrations I was trying to do, into libraries like highcharts for strange reasons etc.

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