Some composite charts are quite annoying to be generated well (like bullet, waterfall etc), their Vega-Lite equivalent can be quite long if just starting from scratch.

The intention here is that Flint is a simpler abstraction to get basic setups right and any followup edits can be done on top of the first compiled outputs (thus not limiting expressiveness). It also makes it easier for user to manipulate (like swapping axes, click to change something, which can be very hard if LLM generates a complex chart spec upfront).

But for many basic stuff your intuition is completely right.

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NicuCalcea 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That's fair, I generally make charts for publication, so I spend much more time and effort on the details. But I can understand this being useful for quick exploration for some people.

Generally speaking, I suggest anyone interested in learning to make charts get familiar with grammar of graphics [0] libraries like Vega-Lite, Observable Plot, ggplot2, Altair. There is a bit of a learning curve if you're used to selecting chart types like in Excel, but once it clicks, it gives you virtually unlimited choices in the kinds of charts you can make. And with ggplot or Observable Plot [1], it's about the same number of lines as something like Flint.

0: https://data.europa.eu/apps/data-visualisation-guide/why-you...

1: https://observablehq.com/@observablehq/plot-gallery

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chenglong-hn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Grammar of graphics has been the foundation of a lot of stuff and definitely worth learning for everyone!

A challenge with GoG is that it assumes configurations as second-class stuff, which makes it quite difficult for users to deal with things like changing formatter, scale, annotations. Flint kinda want to hide this aways (so Flint sets them on behalf of the agent or the user). But yeah, GoG is still the foundation for expressivenss.

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NicuCalcea 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Can you elaborate on what you mean? Why is it more difficult to deal with formatters, scales, annotations compared with other solutions? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, the defaults are similar to what you would get in Flint, and if you want to add or customise anything, it's usually just one extra line. That's kind of the entire point of the grammar of graphics.

	▲	chenglong-hn an hour ago \| parent [-]
		https://microsoft.github.io/flint-chart/#/ The "how it works" section explains a little bit of this. For example, for the heatmap example showing temporal data, for a "good-looking" chart, we need to (1) reconcile the conflict between banded discrete steps and continuous temporal axis, and it requires understanding and setting stepsize and time parser, (2) for the correlation color, we need to set domain etc under the color axis. These are supposed to be handled automatically as system defaults, but the tricky part is that these decisions are "semantical", thus requires us to understand the data and design principles, thus existing languages won't stretch that far. And the actual good looking spec is actually over 40 lines of json spec with many low-level paramters, way beyond the simple 5 line encoding promised by GoG. Flint uses semantic type and a layout optimization algorithm to handle this, so 5 lines of encoding + data semantic types can derive rest parameters automatically. Some examples in the gallery are more extreme: like the waterfall chart example is way over 100 lines of code, and sunbusrt, rose chart are even more since compositions are quite difficult in GoG. Glad to have a discussion on this level! In fact, we wrote a paper about this, will be putting it online in a week or so!