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Comment by plaidfuji

I work with chemical and materials companies on full stack data capabilities and interactive viz / dashboarding is a recurring pain point. Frequently there are larger scale processes (beyond a single engineer’s or scientist’s scope) that still require scientific-level interactive viz that the likes of PowerBI or Tableau can’t (or won’t?) provide… if your company even has a subscription. Things like being able to dynamically re-group/nest variables and recalculate statistical tests, dual axis capabilities, automatic sig fig number reformatting, just all kinds of quality-of-life features that in some cases are possible but in most cases are considered extreme edge cases and require too much manual config / aren’t templatizable.

Of course on the other end you’ve got the whole Python/matplotlib/seaborn/bokeh/plotly/vega/altair “ecosystem” (although it’s more of a swamp if you ask me), which require someone to maintain Python code and a means to stand up an internal server. Not to mention that most use cases require significant customization. Plotly Dash always seems somewhat promising but as someone below mentioned it’s actually kind of slow? Every time I try it I’m just kind of underwhelmed.

I hear ggplot in R is good but I’ve never used R and it’s hard to get a critical mass of people in a company behind R so that’s kind of off the table.

The only programs that really get the aesthetics of scientific plotting right without a ton of customization are JMP, Origin, and Igor Pro (props if you’ve heard of it), but these are all desktop apps… although JMP is starting to make a push into cloud-hosted stuff.

I guess all that is to say if anyone is interested in starting a company in this space, let me know.

parent plaidfuji 2 years ago

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