Comments on: ggplot and concepts — what’s right, and what’s wrong

By: chango

chango — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 01:55:14 +0000

Interesting criticisms of ggplot2. I actually came to this page from R bloggers to see if Hadley had weighed in. He’s extremely open to criticism and outside ideas (there are many developers of ggplot and they are an amazing community, he’s not the only person driving it).

In fact, ggplot2 is under going major work currently (under the guise of a separate layers package), see the thread in the ggplot2-dev group.

http://groups.google.com/group/ggplot2-dev/browse_thread/thread/6d41a475a51025d1

Here he describes the what and the why of rewriting it. He’s aware of the speed issues, and the nightmare of the proto objects ( which i was expecting to be is major drawback). The appropriate use of operators for clarity is a great point (though I believe commutativity a property of the object being operated on and not the operator itself) and I too believe that qplot should be scrapped. Alas, I do not understand the need to build a separate, new jjplot… but it could be cool. There’s just so much awesome work going on on ggplot2.

It’s actually why I switched to R and Hadley’s other packages are equally paradigm changing and save me a ton of work. When they defuddle me, the community is strongly supportive.

By: LC

LC — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 00:55:59 +0000

Very nice post. I do think that there are many appealing concepts and decisions introduced in ggplot, but I get burned every time I learn it because it’s restrictive in the types of plots you can make with its native syntax (HW deliberately makes it difficult if not impossible to make types of plots which he disapproves, and these mostly include issues regarding axis addition or customizations of limits), and also because of the (lack of) speed. And you’re quite right about the “abuse” of the operator! I couldn’t quite put my finger on it but you are spot on in that it does break your intuitive understanding of what is advertised as a superposition of layers. Having complained about all this, HW’s packages (reshape, plyr) are still the main reason why I use R, but in the end I still go back to lattice graphics for the plotting. It’s warty, but fast and amenable for further customization than ggplot2 (and there’s even a ggplot2like() themed settings available in latticeExtra).

By: eric

eric — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 15:00:04 +0000

I’ve been struggling with ggplot and the Wickham book for a few weeks now. I find ggplot VERY difficult to learn. And the book is not really all that great in terms of explaining things. Concepts like a pie chart is just a stacked bar chart, objects are hierarchial, the + operator is overloaded, and what we’re doing here is concatentating layers make me think to myself, huh, what ????

I sure hope jjplot takes off and someone writes a simple easy to understand book about it.

By: MartinInFrankfurtaM

MartinInFrankfurtaM — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:17:10 +0000

After trying for weeks to understand the gg-implementation of the grammar of graphics, after studying the book and the web-site and the forums, I feel enlightened after reading this post.
The ggplot use of the overloaded “+” amounts to abuse, because addition is commutative and layering is not.
Could you please write more about the structure of the ggplot() object and the print method?

By: stat arb

stat arb — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 06:09:25 +0000

Yeah, this looks a little confusing conceptually … but it sounds like if one mastered it, then one has already abstracted presentation from data in a programmatic way, such that any implementation would already have the visualization taken care of.

Kind of like LaTeX I guess. But it’s funny how the default is supposed to be all you need and yet people modify things all the time. All of my formulae have \, \; \! for example and I’m not a command-defining wizard like some.

By: ygc

ygc — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:10:25 +0000

quite agree with you that qplot confuse many new users.

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Sun, 24 Oct 2010 23:17:12 +0000

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