As the title says, which programming language would you agree had the best libraries for visualisation (graphs, 3d models, charts, networks, animations, etc)?
Prefer languages with libraries that have more visulatizaton features than say, ease of using the libraries.
For certain highly formalized types of diagrams - for example flow charts -, PlantUML is great, and since it uses a textual language, it could be wired to a lot of different programs.
MetaPost ist similar but a bit lower level. It can generate very complex diagrams for arbitrary content.For example, I used it once to draw and publish a globe-like 3D sphere with fields depicting different spherical probability values in it.
Racket, a Scheme descendent, is very nice for elementary graphics - it can output pictures in the REPL of its integrated IDE, DrRacket. And it can output these seamlessly as vector graphics, or into interactive user interfaces, too. It also has an elementary but good graphing package. I have used it for a web app which did some data analysis, presented it as a plot in SVG format in the browser, and provided a PDF for download. Neat!
And then there is Python with Matplotlib. It is made for almost every imaginable visualization of numerical data.
For 3D data, there is VTK, which has bindings for C++, Tcl/Tk, Java, and Python.
And TeX/LaTeX with various graphing packages.
As said, all of these can be used programmatically, and can be included in other systems, as long as the latter can generate text commands which can piped into these special-languages, or library calls.
Typst and LaTeX libraries can be used to create a variety of graphs within a text document, but no animations
I moved from Python to Julia. I primarily generate mathematical images and videos: fractals, chaotic systems, complex functions, etc. I’ve found Julia to be faster with better libraries for my purposes (eg. VideoIO).
I don’t do charts, graphs, etc… but I imagine Julia has great libraries for that stuff too.
Python Bokeh: https://bokeh.org/
Python had some pretty cool math graph library (matplotlib, plotly, seaborn, silx…), R is also well know for this kind of stuff.
TIL the python plotly library is a wrapper round a JS library of the same name
Wouldn’t JavaScript really take the cake here? Like, Python definitely has some good libraries but JavaScript lives in the browser, interfaces with HTML5 canvas, and is far more popular by the nature of the web.
Svg support is also native, which is great for certain applications.
Depends what you want to do, but for scientific stuff, R or MATLAB.
With all my dislike towards Matlab, it had great plots.
Manim Community is a community fork of 3blue1brown’s awesome manim visualization library for python.
Processing at least for 2d stuff.
js has access to Apache echarts, which has a lot of diagrams and good api and doc with example
Python has access to matplotlib, plotly and more.
Both have the advantage of good support for secondary feature for data gathering and ui.
Mathematica’s visualizations are good, but this is the first and last positive thing I’ll ever say about it otherwise lmao
