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Longtime D3 (even Protovis) user here. I think you're very correct in that D3 itself is not a good choice for "a simple chart or graph". If that's all I needed, I'd stick with HighCharts, or ggplot, or any of dozens of other libraries that do simple charts well, and often with a lot more batteries included. My unsolicited advice would be to consider staying away from D3 until you need it.

But if you're doing anything remotely bespoke, with any sort of custom interaction or transition, or anything in which you need to multiplex several datasets in a single set of visualizations, this toolkit is hard to beat.

My favorite personal D3 use case so far is modified animated scatter plots/beeswarms using force layouts. Immortalized for me in the "Four Ways to Slice Obama’s 2013 Budget Proposal" ( https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012... ), I've found that set of techniques useful for visualizing business processes in my own work over the years.

I've yet to encounter anything else that comes close to enabling those kinds of data visualizations. It's the "funky abstractions" some folks have trouble with that enable me to swap out X or Y scales with intuitive animations by literally replacing a single object and then re-invoking an idempotent render() function. Working with D3 is the most productive I've ever been in my life from a data visualization standpoint, and I suspect that will continue to be the case for some years.

This. I rewrote pure-JS implementation of some topology visualization in D3 and very much regretted it. The abstractions are simply weird, documentation poor and the resulting code difficult to reason about and maintain. Useful for toy projects, but I wouldn't use it in a serious app anymore.

> I really wish there was a library out there like D3 that tried harder not to surprise me with every abstraction.

Interestingly enough, I find that the combination of React + inline SVG fill this space pretty nicely. The engine is well thought out and documented, as is SVG. And animations are easier to do with CSS anyway.

EDIT: note that React is declarative too, which helps with visualizations a lot.

> It still takes me a crazy amount of time to get a simple chart or graph working in D3

Wrong tool for the job.

D3 fills the void between "just send my data to a bar chart" and "I need some charts, maybe I'll use raw JS to manipulate SVG's". You're probably in the former camp.

Out of curiosity, what would you use for "just send my data to a bar chart?"

I really like chart.js

http://www.chartjs.org/docs/latest/

http://www.chartjs.org/samples/latest/

The examples do "cubic" instead of just "connecting the dots" but luckily it can be turned off:

http://www.chartjs.org/samples/latest/charts/line/interpolat...

HighCharts for paid, Chart.js for open source.

Flot is also a good choice. It's old now and hasn't been updated in a long while but if I'm not mistaken, grafana still makes use of it.

What the other replies said.

AmCharts

Google Charts is an option I use a lot - surprised more people don't know about it. Maybe just because it was developed before the hip new land of React? (A bunch of react wrappers exist for it though)

https://developers.google.com/chart/

In addition to the alternatives already mentioned I really like https://frappe.io/charts

Why would you say that?

`The last thing I did was an area graph that you could click and drag one of the edges and it would update the numbers in the legend as you did it.`

That doesn't sound like "just send my data to a bar chart" to me.

try Billboard.js a nice wrapper on top of D3v4 https://naver.github.io/billboard.js/demo/#Chart.Combination...