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Comment by probdist | Hacker News Reader

I find it wildly perplexing that there are so many frameworks and libraries for javascript graphics and data visualization.

Wikipedia has a comparison matrix of 37 different libraries. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_JavaScript_charti...

Here is a list describing briefly at least 50 libraries: http://techslides.com/50-javascript-charting-and-graphics-li...

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Palantir tried to solve this with Plottable. See their presentation from JsConf 2014 about this http://2014.jsconf.eu/speakers/dan-mane-why-are-there-so-man...

Yeah, it is ridiculous. We need to develop one universal graphic and data visualization library that covers everyone's use cases.

I get the sarcasm, but do you really need 37 friggin libraries to cover everyone's use cases in the relatively small field of JS graphing libraries?

Why do say it's a relatively small field? Outside of mobile, the desktop web is the front end target in all of computing these days, and JS is the only reasonable way to write for it.

Sarcasm aside that would be great.

And we already do that in other domains, e.g. NumPy covers most people Python number crunching use cases, Cocoa covers 95% of OS X people UI use cases, etc, MySQL and PostgreSQL cover 80% of the web app db use cases, Rails covers 90% of Ruby's webapp uses cases, Django and Flask do the same for Python, etc...

> We need to develop one universal graphic and data visualization library

<xkcd>There are now 38 different libraries</xkcd>

Yet they have so few dealing with graph data structures.

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