On Mar 11, 2013, at 11:26 AM, Jason Dagit wrote:
Myself and several of my friends would find it useful to have a plotting library that we can use from ghci to quickly/easily visualize data. Especially if that data is part of a simulation we are toying with. Therefore, this proposal is for: A gnuplot-, matlab- or plotinum-like plotting API (that uses diagrams as the backend?). The things to emphasize: * Easy to install: No gtk2hs requirement. Preferably just pure haskell code and similar for any dependencies. Must be cross platform. * Frontend: graphs should be easy to construct; customizability is not as important * Backend: options for generating static images are nice, but for the use case we have in mind also being able to render in a window from ghci is very valuable. (this could imply something as purely rendering to JuicyPixels and I could write the rendering code)
* What I would hope from you is a willingness to exchange email and/or chat with the student(s) over the course of the project, to give them a bit of guidance/mentoring. I am certainly willing to help on that front, but of course I probably don't know much about your particular project.
I am willing/able to take on the mentoring aspect :)
i second this, but with a different emphasis. i would like a ggplot2-type DSL for generating graphs, for data analysis and exploration. i agree with : * it would be great to have no gtk2hs / cairo requirement. (i guess this means text rendering in the diagrams-svg backend needs to be solved.) i guess in the near-term, this is less important to me -- having a proper plotting DSL at all is an important start. * frontend : graphs should be easy to construct, but having some flexibility is important. the application here is being able to explore statistical data, with slicing, grouping, highlighting, faceting, etc. * backend : static images are enough for me, interactive is a plus. most importantly : it should be fast enough to work pleasantly with large datasets. ggplot2 is pretty awesome but kills my machine, routinely. i would be willing to mentor, but i'm not an expert enough i think! best, ben