I am not sure, because I haven’t seen the sort of libraries people could design for jupyter/juno display if they were unshackled from having to provide a common interface for print-focused plots. I imagine pretty cool stuff with Reactive.jl, Interactive.jl, etc. I have the seen some pretty cool interactive web graphics over the last few years…
Moreover, are we sure that even if the dependent library issue requiring the use of eval for backends that it will be fast to use? There is a LOT of code to compile for a general front-end to backend interface, and I am not convinced it could all be precompiled.
But my main concern is less suggesting the longterm solution, and more trying to figure out a short-term (ie until October or so) to prevent my grad students and coauthors from revolting.
Since the target isn’t even clear, and we want to get people using Julia before then, we need a solution. What I was planning to tell people was:
- use PlotlyJS.jl as your first place to explore the results, and it may be good enough for a while
- directly use PyPlot.jl for building higher quality output for slides, papers, etc as required. I typically find that you write those sorts well after the initial exploration of the results.
- finally, consider Plots.jl as a simple interface for producing plots or reading existing examples (with the understanding it is very slow to use right now, and will change in the medium term).
Is that good advice, or am I leading them astray?