
Ask HN: What is your preferred data visualization library and why? - dmos62
All other things being equal, which would you choose?
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mtmail
For geographic data
[https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe](https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe)
(examples
[https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe/blob/master/MADE_WITH.m...](https://github.com/mapbox/tippecanoe/blob/master/MADE_WITH.md)),
if I had enough time to learn a new one [http://kepler.gl/](http://kepler.gl/)

For bar charts [http://www.chartjs.org/](http://www.chartjs.org/) and when
requirements are more complex [http://nvd3.org/](http://nvd3.org/) or
[https://d3js.org/](https://d3js.org/)

For time series it used to be
[https://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/](https://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/)
but last release was 5 years ago.

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dmos62
My interest in the different paradigms and approaches to data visualization
stems from some problems I'm working on having a lot of parallels with how
plotting library APIs work.

Personally, my main encounter with plotting was in Python. I'm not a big fan
of matplotlib, I got the impression that with increasing plot complexity, code
complexity grew exponentially. Then there's bokeh [0], which I preferred to
matplotlib, due to it being more declarative. HoloViews [1] is more
declarative than both matplotlib and bokeh, and boasts that "usually [you can]
express what you want to do in very few lines of code, letting you focus on
what you are trying to explore and convey, not on the process of plotting".
I've not used HoloViews yet.

Then I've heard of R's ggplot [2], which is based on (or inspired by?) The
Grammar of Graphics [3]. This books is definitely something I want to check
out.

Vega [4], an “assembly language” for visualization, is neither here nor there
as far as this discussion goes, but nonetheless I just stumbled upon it and
I'm quite optimistic about the initiative. Maybe someone will not have heard
of it.

[0]
[https://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/docs/user_guide/concepts....](https://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/docs/user_guide/concepts.html)
[1] [http://holoviews.org/](http://holoviews.org/) [2]
[http://r4ds.had.co.nz/data-visualisation.htm](http://r4ds.had.co.nz/data-
visualisation.htm) [3] [https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-
Computing...](https://www.amazon.com/Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-
Computing/dp/0387245448) [4]
[https://vega.github.io/vega/about/](https://vega.github.io/vega/about/)

