Plotting a histogram in Julia

New to Julia
21

The problem was

julia> pyplot()

which tells Plots to use the Matplotlib backend, even if GR is correctly installed.

22

On trendlines, the answer is simple: yes. But that work needs to happen in vega-lite itself, not the julia wrapper. I know the dev team there has that on their roadmap, so hopefully some day it will just magically appear :slight_smile:

The question on alternative APIs is a bit more difficult. My thinking right now is that I don’t think more canned plotting APIs belong in VegaLite.jl itself, I think that package should probably stick to the grammar of graphics API style. BUT, I think it would be awesome to have another package that sits on top of VegaLite.jl that might have APIs like histogram(data). The Vega.jl package actually had that sort of API, but I think that package is not active/working right now (not 100% sure, though). Another option would probably be to create a vega/vega-lite backend for Plots.jl, right?

23

That’s an option, but in my way making it a Plots backend would take away a lot of what’s nice with VegaLite, which is the GOG interface. Well, maybe VegaLite JSON could be automatically translated to Plots recipes, at which point the functionality would go both ways - an interesting project!

24

Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to take the GOG interface away! But I think we could also provide a more Plots.jl like interface. And I just don’t know whether that would be better achieved via a Plots.jl backend or a separate, standalone API. Or something Makie.jl related? I have to admit I’m not on top of the current roadmap for that ecosystem :slight_smile: