Robert,
I have been working with ggplot2 in R for a while now -- it is a great
library and I use it every day. I think it is written in pure R, but
depends on many R libraries which themselves are written in a combination of
R and C. In particular, it is built on top of Paul Murrell's Grid Graphics
which in turn is built on top of base R graphics, which takes care of the
annoying interfaces to the various low-level graphics libraries. (Frankly, I
am not quite sure why Grid Graphics isn't built on top of a standard,
cross-platform, high-level base like GTK, cairo, PDF, or OpenGL.)
It's great strength is -- as you might expect -- statistical graphics where
you have discrete observations. Starting from those, you can slice, dice,
and display in a variety of very useful ways (colors, shapes, facets,
legends, ...), add statistical summaries (smoothers, regression fits, ...),
and so on.
On the other hand, it doesn't do anything at all for what I think is the
primary use case of Maxima graphics, namely plotting continuous functions --
if you want to do that, you have to precalculate the data points. It also
doesn't produce 3d output.
On the level of ideas we could borrow, there are certainly some good ones,
notably the systematic syntax, the separation of content from style (theme),
the clean and beautiful default styles, the automatic mapping of attributes
to colors, etc. But I think that many of its strengths aren't particularly
applicable to function graphing, and many of the requirements of function
graphing (e.g. adaptive evaluation points) aren't handled by it.
-s
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 11:28 AM, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>wrote:
> Hello, I came across this plotting library ---
>
> http://had.co.nz/ggplot2/
>
> I think we might get some useful ideas here
> (although it seems unlikely that we can actually
> import any of the code; it's for R and probably
> written in a mix of R and C).
>
> FWIW
>
> Robert Dodier
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