Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

How does this differ conceptually from Tableau? Yes, I'm asking this (annoying) question even though the OP states, "Lyra is more expressive than interactive systems like Tableau, allowing designers to create custom visualizations comparable to hand-coded visualizations built with D3 or Processing."

...yeah, but how exactly? Because it looks about as complicated of a GUI as Tableau...and I don't have enough knowledge of Tableau to compare it against the video, as Tableau's interface is so befuddling that I thank God I stumbled unto web development, as painful as that journey has been, so that I could code my own interactives rather than have to learn Tableau's conventions.

I guess the issue with Lyra is the same with all other programs that claim "custom visualization design without writing any code"...the two desired features, "custom" and "without writing any code"...are, IMHO, at odds with one another. If you want to do anything custom and interactive, you will pretty much have to do something as complicated as code...and pushing a series of buttons and clicking through menus may end up as being as intellectually challenging as just learning programming.

Also, I don't see how the Lyra visualizations are comparable to D3...D3 is amazing because it is a relatively minimalistic framework for coding visualizations...the kind of flexible, expressive visualizations you can do are possible because you are allowed to expressively code them via D3. I don't really see how Lyra (or any GUI) could accomplish that conceptual feat.

I'd classify Lyra as a custom visualization design surface while tableau is more of a data exploration tool. Quite different I think in both use an intent.

Tableau is great for quickly pulling in data and building towards pretty standard charts, then playing around within them to explore the data. It drives you towards relatively simple charts that most people can understand and that's a good thing because most of it's users need significant guidance. And tableau is also a dashboarding platform, but I'm assuming you're talking about just the main visualization builder.

Lyra on the other hand is more of a photoshop like tool for producing unique data graphics. That's where the comparison to custom visualizations in d3 makes sense. d3 isn't about building standard charts (though you can do so) it's a framework for building all sorts of custom rich interactive visualizations. You can do some data exploration in Lyra, but a more constrained tool like tableau, spotfire, etc is easier for that purpose. Where Lyra is interesting IMO is in it's ability to make more custom visualizations without coding - seems like using some kind of grammar of graphics definition under the hood.

Programming languages/frameworks like R, julia, pandas, d3 etc are of course the most flexible tools but they've got a high barrier of entry for a lot of folks who need to produce visualizations and explore data. For the most part this level of vis customization has been restricted to writing a program - lyra feels a lot like a nicer visual ggplot designer in R - so it's nice to see someone making an attempt at bringing some of these capabilities into a gui.

I work on this project.

One crucial thing to make the GUI simpler than code is direct manipulation. Working with a graphics program, like Inkscape, for example, is much easier for most graphics tasks than writing raw SVGs.

For most tasks in Lyra, you can simply drag-and-drop elements onto the visualization to make it respond the way you want. In advanced cases, true, you do have to navigate menus and buttons. For many of those cases, rather than writing raw D3 code, there's the Vega project. Vega is a declarative format for describing visualizations using a JSON format. Lyra generates Vega specifications for rendering, which can then be modified manually.

Vega: https://github.com/trifacta/vega

Thanks for the response...I know of Vega and think this is a great use of it. Being able to export into an open format already puts this ahead of Tableau in my book.

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