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Personally, I don't _want_ a grammar of graphics; I want a grammar of data, where the data happens to have a graphical representation. I don't want to spend age

Personally, I don't _want_ a grammar of graphics; I want a grammar of data, where the data happens to have a graphical representation. I don't want to spend ages piecing together a fancy plot; I want to spend just a little time annotating my data to declare what it means, and then no matter how I slice and dice my data it will show up in a meaningful way. That way I can explore it to really understand it, which is the point of HoloViews (http://holoviews.org http://holoviews.org). But people approach plotting in lots of different ways, and some people actually _do_ want to spend their time making plots, so they are welcome to their ggplot2!

gaius 8y ago
I don't _want_ a grammar of graphics; I want a grammar of data, where the data happens to have a graphical representation The point of having a graphical representation is to communicate with other humans therefore some subjective judgement is required; there’s no “one true plot” for each type of data.
- jbednar 8y ago
  Of course! HoloViews does allow infinite customizability, to pull out more and more subtle features, show things more clearly, and just to make it look nice or to match your favorite style. But unlike ggplot2, HoloViews does that in a way that can apply to the _data_, rather than having to recapitulate the process every single time you build an individual plot. That way you and your colleagues can together build up whatever style you find most effective, then keep working with it across the full multidimensional landscape of data that you work with in a particular field. HoloViews is a completely different approach, if you really let the ideas sink in (e.g. from our paper about it at http://conference.scipy.org/proceedings/scipy2015/pdfs/jean-luc_stevens.pdf http://conference.scipy.org/proceedings/scipy2015/pdfs/jean-...), and is in no way a second-class citizen compared to ggplot2 or any other approach in R...
  - gaius 8y ago
    I’ll check it out, thanks for the tip!

gaius 8y ago

I don't _want_ a grammar of graphics; I want a grammar of data, where the data happens to have a graphical representation The point of having a graphical representation is to communicate with other humans therefore some subjective judgement is required; there’s no “one true plot” for each type of data.

jbednar 8y ago
Of course! HoloViews does allow infinite customizability, to pull out more and more subtle features, show things more clearly, and just to make it look nice or to match your favorite style. But unlike ggplot2, HoloViews does that in a way that can apply to the _data_, rather than having to recapitulate the process every single time you build an individual plot. That way you and your colleagues can together build up whatever style you find most effective, then keep working with it across the full multidimensional landscape of data that you work with in a particular field. HoloViews is a completely different approach, if you really let the ideas sink in (e.g. from our paper about it at http://conference.scipy.org/proceedings/scipy2015/pdfs/jean-luc_stevens.pdf http://conference.scipy.org/proceedings/scipy2015/pdfs/jean-...), and is in no way a second-class citizen compared to ggplot2 or any other approach in R...
- gaius 8y ago
  I’ll check it out, thanks for the tip!