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Comment by vavooom | Hacker News Reader

A larger, more detailed introduction to this topic is best discussed by Hadley Wickham in his seminal paper "A Layered Grammar of Graphics".

https://byrneslab.net/classes/biol607/readings/wickham_layer...

Wickham is the Chief Scientist at RStudio and created R packages such as ggplot2 and the tidyverse.

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Even more detailed is the original book by Leland Wilkinson, on which ggplot2 is based: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/0-387-28695-0.

The original implementations go back to SYSTAT and SPSS GPL (Graphics Production Language).

GPL especially, with its statement-based approach, has arguably better ergonomics for interactively and iteratively producing plots compared to function-based approaches.

I use ggplot2 regularly and have read Wilkinson but honestly I have a bit of trouble seeing how ggplot2 is an implementation of Wilkinson's book.

(It's been a few years, maybe I should take another look at the book.)

The overview links to the book. See: https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/

> ggplot2 is a system for declaratively creating graphics, based on The Grammar of Graphics.

I have the book! I just should figure out where it is on my shelves.

Rather expensive by my standards these days. When I was a starving student, I would not have hesitated to buy it from that corner in the back of Cody's Books.

Springer runs occasional sales up to 40% discount about once a year, but a don't recall if "The Grammar of Graphics" was eligible last time.

They're running a sale right now, through June 30, but it doesn't look like G of G is eligible: https://link.springer.com/shop/springer/yellow-sale/en-eu/

Love that paper. Wickham also made his ggplot2 book freely available:

https://ggplot2-book.org/

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