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Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

microsoft.github.io

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Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#71

Post by HawtAds »

chrisweekly wrote: post #64
HawtAds wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, TanStack Charts was also released a couple days ago with a similar design. https://tanstack.com/charts/latest

Yeah I was going to share it too. I watched a yt video yesterday where Tanner talks about how (in contrast to trad component-based libs) it takes a very different approach to composition, letting D3 do the heavy lifting and using its visual grammar, and staying grounded in putting the data (not the component tree) first.

I wish they would provide an ECharts backend, it's probably one of the most performant and featureful charting libraries you can find.

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#73

Post by DespairTensor »

Imanari wrote: post #35

What is wrong with "please make plot XYZ in plotly?"

If you're doing automated data visualization, "please make plot XYZ in plotly" needs a sandbox to execute the JS or Python code. With something like this you can avoid it, you just validate it and plot it. If the LLMs are better at generating Flint than Vega-Lite specs then I see how the project can be useful.

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#74

Post by siliconc0w »

DSLs for AI doesn't really make sense- they were trained on existing graphics libraries and are pretty good at them.

Maybe a long term play would be putting this out and creating a "graphics bench" to entice the labs to overfit on your DSL but that seems like a lot of work

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#75

Post by abirch »

akst wrote: post #10

Even in the Era AI, GGPlot's API is still the best charting API. The name "Grammar of Graphics" isn't just marketing, they literally sought to write a god damn grammar to was capable of expressing all possible qualitative graphics. They even wrote a book about how they went about it (not that it speaks to the quality of the API) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/0-387-28695-0 I actually stumbled upon this book w…

Have you checked out plotnine?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/main/p... it's made by the same people behind ggplot. Hadley Wickham worked for RStudio which also created plotnine.

plotnine is currently sponsored by Posit where Hadley works.

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#78

Post by darksim905 »

akst wrote: post #10

Even in the Era AI, GGPlot's API is still the best charting API. The name "Grammar of Graphics" isn't just marketing, they literally sought to write a god damn grammar to was capable of expressing all possible qualitative graphics. They even wrote a book about how they went about it (not that it speaks to the quality of the API) https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/0-387-28695-0 I actually stumbled upon this book w…

I'm curious as to why that book is so god damn expensive.

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#79

Post by kristiandupont »

refactor_master wrote: post #5

When does it get too abstract? What’s wrong with plotly? Or plotly express? How is yet another JSON spec era-anything?

>When does it get too abstract?

When the abstraction detracts more value than it provides.

I think this is an interesting direction to explore. Plotly is fine. So is D3 and plenty of other solutions, but neither represent the ultimate pinnacle of charting.

Re: Flint: A Visualization Language for the AI Era

#80

Post by malshe »

akst wrote: post #58
williamcotton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They even wrote a book about how they went about it (not that it speaks to the quality of the API) Wilkinson’s Grammar of Graphics inspired ggplot. The textbook doesn’t even mention ggplot. Shameless plug for my own GoG inspired DSL, Algraf: https://williamcotton.github.io/algraf/demos There’s a Minard plot in the demos!

Oh… I assumed it was a further expansion of the ideas that with into ggplot as they all look like ggplot charts and ideas were identical I wish I could edit my original comment to add this correction.

You aren’t far off. The creator of ggplot2, Hadley Wickham, based his dissertation on GoG. Ggplot2 came out of his PhD thesis if I’m not mistaken.
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