Introducing Quick Plot: ggplot-Style Plotting for Lisp-Stat

Today we’re releasing quick-plot, a new system for Lisp-Stat that bring ggplot2-style composable plotting to Common Lisp. plot/vega is able to render any Vega-Lite specification (here’s 50 examples), but it can at times be a bit wordy constructing the nested plists by hand.

Overview

Instead of specifying each plot in detail, quick-plot provides a set of helper functions that work similarly to geom in ggplot. Essentially we borrow ggplot’s concept of a plot as a composition of independent layers (which is what Vega-Lite does anyway), each with one concern:

Each function returns a plist fragment. A recursive merge-plists combines them into a single Vega-Lite spec. A mark function never sets axis titles; label never touches encodings; theme never alters mark types. You can add, remove, or swap any layer without affecting the others.

Simple example

Setup environment:

(asdf:load-system :quick-plot)
(vega:load-vega-examples)

(import '(geom:point geom:bar geom:histogram geom:box-plot geom:line))
(import '(gg:label gg:axes gg:coord gg:theme gg:tooltip))
(import '(qplot:qplot))

Basic scatter plot

The simplest scatter plot needs just a name, a data frame, and two field names:

(qplot 'cars-basic vgcars
  `(:title "Horsepower vs. MPG")
   (point :horsepower :miles-per-gallon))

Add labels

Scatter plot with labels:

(qplot 'blog-labels vgcars
  `(:title "Vega Cars")
   (point :horsepower :miles-per-gallon :filled t)
   (label :x "Engine Horsepower" :y "Fuel Efficiency (MPG)"))

Get fancy

Now you can add size of the point to encode some data, along with color:

(qplot 'cars-bubble vgcars
  `(:title "Bubble: Size = Acceleration")
   (point :horsepower :miles-per-gallon
          :color :origin :size :acceleration
          :filled t)
   (label :x "Horsepower" :y "Miles per Gallon"))

Get started

See the quick-plot cookbook for recipes for some common plot types.

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