The design philosophy of Great Tables

#1

Post by randyzwitch » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:00 PM UTC

The design philosophy of Great Tables
posit-dev.github.io

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#2

Post by ttymck » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:41 PM UTC

Wow. This looks incredible, thanks for sharing.

It makes me wonder how we've gone this long with increasingly poor data table presentations (the mid-century modern tables are astutely pointed to as shining examples).

This makes me excited to get back into data analysis with python. Moreover, I see some possible API improvements and extensions I'd like to make.

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#3

Post by sebastiansm » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:45 PM UTC

It's great that the RStudio team is working on Python libraries.

Hope to see dplyr and ggplot someday on Python.

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#4

Post by hadley » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:46 PM UTC

sebastiansm wrote: post #3

It's great that the RStudio team is working on Python libraries. Hope to see dplyr and ggplot someday on Python.

You should check out https://siuba.org and https://plotnine.org :)

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#5

Post by acrophiliac » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:46 PM UTC

While I'm waiting for the packages to download, can you explain how I get tabular output when I run a python application using your package at the command line? Does it produce HTML output? PDF? Your "getting started" docs doesn't explain.

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#6

Post by randyzwitch » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:47 PM UTC

sebastiansm wrote: post #3

It's great that the RStudio team is working on Python libraries. Hope to see dplyr and ggplot someday on Python.

plotnine is a ggplot also funded by Posit (though, externally developed)

https://plotnine.org/

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#7

Post by cscheid » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:50 PM UTC

acrophiliac wrote: post #5

While I'm waiting for the packages to download, can you explain how I get tabular output when I run a python application using your package at the command line? Does it produce HTML output? PDF? Your "getting started" docs doesn't explain.

You use it indeed to generate HTML output. For Python+Jupyter folk, that's most directly applicable to Jupyter Lab or Jupyter Notebook settings. You can use it with Jupyter book, nbconvert, or any other tools that convert .ipynb to HTML output...

(Disclosure: Quarto dev here) ..., like Quarto. You can use `great_tables` in code cells in Quarto to get great tables in your RevealJS presentation or website, https://quarto.org/docs/output-formats/html-code.html.

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#8

Post by throwaway81523 » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:52 PM UTC

This article is mostly blither, whether or not it is AI generated. It is about a Python library for generating nicely formatted HTML tables, though they don't tell you much about it til the near the end. The library seems to use an OOP approach. An alternative approach might be more declarative. The product name "Great Tables" appears in boldface over and over (no idea if the font helps SEO) and the name itself is awfully pretentious imho. Overall, the library itself sounds ok,, but the blog post is the annoying market-speak that frequently makes me cringe here on HN.

It would be nice to add some interactivity features to the tables, like ActiveAdmin in Rails.

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#9

Post by paddy_m » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:55 PM UTC

Great tables has done some really nice work on python/jupyter tables. It looks like they are almost building a "grammar of tables" similar to a grammar of graphics. More projects should write about their philosophy and aims like this.

I have built a different table library for jupyter called buckaroo. My approach has been different. Buckaroo aims to allow you to interactively cycle through different formats and post-processing functions to quickly glean important insights from a table while working interactively. I took the view that I type the same commands over and over to perform rudimentary exploratory data analysis, those commands and insights should be built into a table.

Great tables seems built so that you can manually format a table for presentation.

https://github.com/paddymul/buckaroo

https://youtu.be/GPl6_9n31NE

Re: The design philosophy of Great Tables

#10

Post by paddy_m » Thu, Apr 04, 2024, 6:56 PM UTC

throwaway81523 wrote: post #8

This article is mostly blither, whether or not it is AI generated. It is about a Python library for generating nicely formatted HTML tables, though they don't tell you much about it til the near the end. The library seems to use an OOP approach. An alternative approach might be more declarative. The product name "Great Tables" appears in boldface over and over (no idea if the font helps SEO) and the name itself is aw…

It's not AI generated. I have tracked the PR as they have worked on it. From what I have seen, the library has declarative elements that are similar to the grammar of graphics.