The real problem with D3 is that, as a library, it doesn't really do visualizations. It gives you functions and exmaples to compose your own visualizations, who

The real problem with D3 is that, as a library, it doesn't really do visualizations. It gives you functions and exmaples to compose your own visualizations, whose key requirement is an expert-level understanding of JavaScript (particularly closures and functional programming). What mbostock says is the core "abstraction" of D3, the select and select diffing, is only an affordance for writing reentrant "paint()", with the flourish that your paint statements are expressed as builder statements, which themselves are scoped to select and can be broken up for various effects. Especially in animated examples, D3 does suprisingly little for you, as it's up to you to write the outer loop and track state over time. Nor does D3 give you any abstraction for encapsulating a visualization, as a function or otherwise. This is left as an exercise for the reader. All of this comes as a big surprise, or shock, to the new D3 user. It would be like adopting a new database and finding only a library for file IO and BTree indices and query optimizers, that you need to wire up yourself.