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Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

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Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#21

Post by throwaway29103 »

theandycamps wrote: post #19

I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production. Findings: I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners. Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is a…

Genuinely curious: what do you mean with respect to "R's non-standard evaluation" and its relationship to DSLs? Thanks in advance.

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#22

Post by throwaway29103 »

prionassembly wrote: post #20
theandycamps wrote: post #19

I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production. Findings: I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners. Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is a…

Do you have any insights on Julia?

I am not the person you are asking, but having used octave, matlab, R, Python for many years and julia for about a month I think that for numerical/algebraic stuff, julia is the one to go; the only reason holding me back is that communities using octave-matlab-R need to be convinced and their codebases need to be ported.

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#23

Post by CreRecombinase »

throwaway29103 wrote: post #21
theandycamps wrote: post #19

I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production. Findings: I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners. Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is a…

Genuinely curious: what do you mean with respect to "R's non-standard evaluation" and its relationship to DSLs? Thanks in advance.

R some very lispy meta-programming features. Very briefly, if I'm a function (go with me here) `foo http://adv-r.had.co.nz/Computing-on-the-language.html

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#24

Post by nerdponx »

throwaway29103 wrote: post #21
theandycamps wrote: post #19

I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production. Findings: I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners. Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is a…

Genuinely curious: what do you mean with respect to "R's non-standard evaluation" and its relationship to DSLs? Thanks in advance.

R gives you the ability to capture un-evaluated expressions, manipulate them, and then evaluate the manipulated versions. This ability lets you construct some fairly powerful DSLs and language extensions.

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#25

Post by melling »

theandycamps wrote: post #19

I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production. Findings: I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners. Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is a…

How about Julia? I’m watching that MIT class with Grant Sanderson that uses Julia. It seems like a reasonable language, and it’s fast.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my opinion after I build a few things. Dynamic typing... hmmm...

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#26

Post by ryndbfsrw »

theandycamps wrote: post #19

I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production. Findings: I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners. Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is a…

> Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is at memory efficiency).

I haven't found that to be the case. Loading a 2gb CSV file when you have 8gb of ram is touch and go with pandas but with data.table it’s a breeze not to mention operations once loaded up are a fair-bit faster. The pythong version has recently been released and already provides a serious speed bump over pandas not to mention out the box memory-mapping for huge files. I recommend checking it out if you haven't heard of it https://h2oai.github.io/db-benchmark/

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#27

Post by jwilber »

theandycamps wrote: post #19

I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production. Findings: I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners. Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is a…

Same and I have to disagree with basically everything you’ve said, save the DSL bit and the R package bit.

In particular, I don’t see how the tidyverse is at all ‘magical’ - take the two most popular tidy libs, dplyr and ggplot2. The api for dplyr is very explicit, intuitive, and based on long-standing precedence (sql). The api for ggplot2 is admittedly less intuitive, but is itself an implementation of widely known framework (Grammar of Graphics). If by magical you mean in their abstractions, those are about as far from magical as one can get.

The tidyverse does get iffy sometimes when you need to dig into the rlang/tidy eval area, but that’s all well-documented.

I haven’t had to use R in a production environment for about a year now, but I always enjoyed the concise tidy api.

Base R is a total mess and largely inconsistent, but I guess that’s what you get when statisticians from different uni’s patchwork a language in their spare time.

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#28

Post by closed »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #15
iav wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder why they decided to start from scratch in Kotlin rather than just add the interactivity feature to plotnine. Now we have two competing projects...

I'm pretty sure that there have been multiple attempts to recreate ggplot in python. I can think of 3-4 off the top of my head.

AFAIK plotnine is the only one with substantial adoption (2.3k stars on github) and active development for several years.

Would be curious to hear which ones you're thinking of (since I wouldn't be surprised if the are others, but also am guessing no others hit both points)

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#29

Post by tbenst »

sandGorgon wrote: post #17

Do try Altair. Here's a post from someone who comes from ggplot2 to Altair - http://fernandoi.cl/blog/posts/altair/ here's the path to Altair scrapping 20k lines of code to make the api simpler - https://twitter.com/jakevdp/status/1006929128119926786 Altair is really good. Probably as good as ggplot2

I love Altair but the practice of encoding data alongside the plots makes it unwieldy for sharing jupyter notebooks (by default a 5000 row limit). Github also fails to preview Altair plots in .ipynb right now

Re: Lets-plot: An interactive Python plotting library using ggplot's API

#30

Post by clircle »

theandycamps wrote: post #19

I've been using R professionally for 4 years. I've been a Python programmer for 6 years. I've shipped large scale applications built on both languages to production. Findings: I honestly don't get the hype around R's plotting capabilities. ggplot2 is nice, but far too magical to be easily understood by beginners. Python offers more intuitive memory management than R (which is really more a statement on how bad R is a…

> Needing to download a million random packages from grad students of the internet is a recipe for disaster.

This is baloney. You don't need to rely on a million R packages. You really only need a good plotting library (the built-in one is fine, or use ggplot), a good data frame library (dplyr, data.table, or use build-in one), and a few extras to handle some weird rough edges (lubridate, forcats).

This takes you to 90% to your analysis goals.

Only novices are 'using a million random packages', which is probably the case for python as well.

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