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D3 7.0

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Re: D3 7.0

#11

Post by macNchz »

whimsicalism wrote: post #9
j-pb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit like complaining that there are examples on codepen. I'm super grateful that they provide such good documentation, which is second to none, in a nicely explorable environment.

The difference is that examples in Codepen are easily reproducable in another environment. d3, on the other hand, has converted most of their examples to Observable, which requires extensive research to convert back to JS (in the best case) and in the worst case requires reverse engineering the runtime. I'm not the only one with this opinion, there are plenty of others who have struggled through similar issues and di…

Yeah I encountered this problem recently as someone who was once reasonably familiar with d3 and came back to it after several years away.

I find myself wanting to start with a working example I can riff off of more in d3 than with many other tools I've used, so I totally understand the appeal of interactive examples in Observable but find it super frustrating and cumbersome when it comes to actually rolling what I'm working on into an existing application.

Re: D3 7.0

#13

Post by kowlo »

whimsicalism wrote: post #7

The one critique I have of D3 is that it is becoming increasingly closely paired with Observable, such that when I'm searching for examples of how to make something in d3, I can only find Observable examples that require the Observable runtime in order to function properly. I think the examples should have a JS native version in addition to the Observable implementation.

Indeed - I don't like the pairing with Observable. I don't like Observable in general because the full experience can't be self-hosted. However, both projects belong to Mike, and D3.js is free - so I can't complain.

Re: D3 7.0

#14

Post by DataCrayon »

whimsicalism wrote: post #7

The one critique I have of D3 is that it is becoming increasingly closely paired with Observable, such that when I'm searching for examples of how to make something in d3, I can only find Observable examples that require the Observable runtime in order to function properly. I think the examples should have a JS native version in addition to the Observable implementation.

That's part of the reason I started my book "Visualisation with D3.js"[1]... it's early access and I'm trying to find more time to work on it, but it's all JS native

[1] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/visualisation-with-d3/

Re: D3 7.0

#15

Post by dimal »

whimsicalism wrote: post #7

The one critique I have of D3 is that it is becoming increasingly closely paired with Observable, such that when I'm searching for examples of how to make something in d3, I can only find Observable examples that require the Observable runtime in order to function properly. I think the examples should have a JS native version in addition to the Observable implementation.

What’s the difference between the two? As someone who only dips into D3 every few years and just discovered Observable, I wasn’t aware that they were different. I thought Observable was just a way of sharing D3 visualizations.

Re: D3 7.0

#16

Post by j-pb »

whimsicalism wrote: post #9
j-pb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit like complaining that there are examples on codepen. I'm super grateful that they provide such good documentation, which is second to none, in a nicely explorable environment.

The difference is that examples in Codepen are easily reproducable in another environment. d3, on the other hand, has converted most of their examples to Observable, which requires extensive research to convert back to JS (in the best case) and in the worst case requires reverse engineering the runtime. I'm not the only one with this opinion, there are plenty of others who have struggled through similar issues and di…

I work with both D3 and Observable full time.

The claim that one has to "reverse engineer the runtime" is simply absurd.

The people that complain about D3 on observable always turn out to have taken neither the time to understand Observable nor D3 and are looking for a way to just copy paste something into their codebase, without understanding it, and without any willingness to really learn the tools they are using. Which would have never worked in the first place, because D3 is not a plotting library like vega or observables plot, it's a library library, building material from which you can build your own bespoke visualisations.

Observable is in essence reevaluating the entire code with each "requestAnimationFrame", no fancy diffing a la react or other magic, if it runs in observable, it will also run in your code as a static thing. Copy paste the cells out of observable, prepend them with a "const" and you're done, not more work than removing and rewriting the boilerplate that's in every codepen.

Re: D3 7.0

#17

Post by j-pb »

dimal wrote: post #15
whimsicalism wrote: post #7

The one critique I have of D3 is that it is becoming increasingly closely paired with Observable, such that when I'm searching for examples of how to make something in d3, I can only find Observable examples that require the Observable runtime in order to function properly. I think the examples should have a JS native version in addition to the Observable implementation.

What’s the difference between the two? As someone who only dips into D3 every few years and just discovered Observable, I wasn’t aware that they were different. I thought Observable was just a way of sharing D3 visualizations.

Observable is like Jupyter for Javascript. A general JS notebook environment, with the added twist that it uses reactive dataflow ideas to evaluate cells in a "right" and deterministic order (a common footgun in Jupyter where cells might be reevaluated manually, resulting in unexpected state).

D3 is a JS library for data visualisations.

Both are the brainchild of Mike Bostock. That's the connection. :)

Re: D3 7.0

#18

Post by tracyhenry »

dimal wrote: post #15
whimsicalism wrote: post #7

The one critique I have of D3 is that it is becoming increasingly closely paired with Observable, such that when I'm searching for examples of how to make something in d3, I can only find Observable examples that require the Observable runtime in order to function properly. I think the examples should have a JS native version in addition to the Observable implementation.

What’s the difference between the two? As someone who only dips into D3 every few years and just discovered Observable, I wasn’t aware that they were different. I thought Observable was just a way of sharing D3 visualizations.

https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/javascript-and-observ...

Re: D3 7.0

#19

Post by Vaslo »

Used this in a data viz class and I’d say it’s overkill for most visualizations. Also very difficult to learn and frustrating to implement with all the “enter, exit” stuff. Excel, Tableau, etc so much easier and most of what you need to do visualizations in the corporate setting. Obviously it’s excellent for very specialized unusual visualizations but it’s rare those are really needed.
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