31–40 of 75 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
what do you mean by "arrow operator"?
Maybe overloadable operators like in C++, where -> usually demotes some kind of deeper access into the object or abstraction? Or, the opposite, and abstracted access.
According to the other comment it seems he meant the |> pipe operator that is under proposal in js
I'd say because JavaScript is insufficiently expressive. No macros, no arrow (pipe) operator, and the premier way of writing it is 4x as verbose than what I'd consider reasonable. D3 is a great library though.
Uh, there are arrow operators in JS. D3.JS in Action Third Edition exclusively uses arrow operators. (Trust me. I don't know jack about JavaScript, I had to get through the MDN docs to understand what they were, and once I did, made a whole lot more sense).
This is why I've always found it weird that people consider D3 to be a charting tool. Yes, people have used it to build a lot of charts, but it's really just a streaming data processing tool. It doesn't provide anything specific to charting[0]. All of that part, you're still left to figure out on your own. [0] At least in the core, I'm not too familiar with the full ecosystem and what is considered official in terms…
This is the answer. People need to consider D3 more as a graphics/dom manipulation library than a charting library.
This is why I've always found it weird that people consider D3 to be a charting tool. Yes, people have used it to build a lot of charts, but it's really just a streaming data processing tool. It doesn't provide anything specific to charting[0]. All of that part, you're still left to figure out on your own. [0] At least in the core, I'm not too familiar with the full ecosystem and what is considered official in terms…
I'd say because JavaScript is insufficiently expressive. No macros, no arrow (pipe) operator, and the premier way of writing it is 4x as verbose than what I'd consider reasonable. D3 is a great library though.
Uh, there are arrow operators in JS. D3.JS in Action Third Edition exclusively uses arrow operators. (Trust me. I don't know jack about JavaScript, I had to get through the MDN docs to understand what they were, and once I did, made a whole lot more sense).
JS does not have a straightforward equivalent. The old and deprecated `with` keyword might seem similar but it's only a surface resemblance as it does not perform the return-value threading that makes the above pattern useful, it was meant for methods that mutate object state. There's a TC39 proposal[2] to add a pipe operator that would accomplish a similar thing to threading macros via an infix operator but it's still a draft.
Note: the example is a misconception and not what's meant by "binding to data." In D3, binding to data refers to using the `.data()` method to supply an object (typically an array) which you can then use in a function callback in the accessors, so like `.attr('x1', d => /* access individual array item here */)`. This allows you to easily bind a dataset to a graphical representation and use its attributes to inform th…
Right? So why load a bunch of JS to do the same thing? One step further, why load any JS at all since you're just generating an SVG? People have forgotten that HTML and SVG are meant to be DATA containers, you don't have to use JSON + JS.
D3 is cool for the advanced visualizations and the interactivity. If you're sticking to static graphs, for the love of god just have the server serve a static SVG.
Note: the example is a misconception and not what's meant by "binding to data." In D3, binding to data refers to using the `.data()` method to supply an object (typically an array) which you can then use in a function callback in the accessors, so like `.attr('x1', d => /* access individual array item here */)`. This allows you to easily bind a dataset to a graphical representation and use its attributes to inform th…
> I'd also argue that D3 is no more verbose than vanilla JS Right? So why load a bunch of JS to do the same thing? One step further, why load any JS at all since you're just generating an SVG? People have forgotten that HTML and SVG are meant to be DATA containers, you don't have to use JSON + JS. D3 is cool for the advanced visualizations and the interactivity. If you're sticking to static graphs, for the love of go…
All right, I got nerdsniped into writing a "yes and" sort of thing even though I agree with the gist of this article :) https://macwright.com/2025/08/21/why-d3-is-so-verbose-anothe...
Ahhhhh. Thanks man. And totally nerding out here because YES. ANIMATIONS. Animations is why I fell in love with wanting to learn D3 in 2019. You can do things as you transition between data steps, that honestly, has been such a pain in the behind to try with anything else. I'm not a web developer. I'm a data guy.
It clearly has some bugs (like the score sometimes being NaN - no idea how I messed that up), but I haven't touched the code in over a decade, so it's a little time capsule.