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wrobstory / vincent

A Python to Vega translator
MIT License
2.04k stars 227 forks source link

docs. why not using MPL? #4

Closed timmie closed 11 years ago

timmie commented 11 years ago

although your graphs look really nice, please add a statement on the docs: what does vega/vincent offer ofer MPL?

wrobstory commented 11 years ago

Just to clarify- are you referring to Matplotlib?

timmie commented 11 years ago

yes.

wrobstory commented 11 years ago

I'm not really sure that vincent can offer MPL anything- two different use cases. There are some people working on hooks for browser based plotting in MPL (see here: https://code.google.com/p/mplh5canvas/), but right now I think vincent's best use case is native embedding or ipython notebooks.

aflaxman commented 11 years ago

If I understand correctly, the grammar-of-graphics philosophy behind Vincent/Vega is quite different than Matplotlib. In a graphics system like Matplotlib, you can display anything. In a grammar-based system, you can only display things that are semantically meaningful representations of data. This is not to say one or the other is better.

timmie commented 11 years ago

see also my question on stackoverflow:

Why is there so much fuzz about d3 and alike? http://stackoverflow.com/a/16262506/1772165

Together with answer from @aflaxman it makes up what I was looking for. Thanks.

timmie commented 11 years ago

only thing I do not understand: Why could we not try to add grammar-of-graphics to MPL? on top of it?

@wrobstory I will test your code in near time.

aflaxman commented 11 years ago

A couple of related links worthy of collecting here: https://github.com/trifacta/vega/wiki/Vega-and-D3 http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/03/23/matplotlib-and-the-future-of-visualization-in-python/ https://github.com/jakevdp/matplotlib_pydata2013

wrobstory commented 11 years ago

Thanks @aflaxman! I'm going to go ahead and close this issue for now, @timmie, you can keep asking questions in this thread if you want.