This is the take on this entire thread that I resonate with the most.
As a systems person, I do not know how to share with a details person how the combination of some magically conjured (and sometimes inscrutable) building blocks can still take us to interesting and joyful end results.
I do understand this sentiment. But I wish these experts would see that they too are novices in literally every other field that they are not explicitly trained or experienced in. It is fun to explore curiosities even in spaces you don't know well.
I feel this so, so much. It is a very exciting time. I have had a very specific goal in mind and I could work out large parts on my own. But there is a lot that I didn't have any basis or time to build expertise on. Using Claude Code to fill out those gaps and educate me along the way has meant I've gotten little sleep in the last two months. And I managed to make the thing I was envisioning: https://gridpaper.org/examples/ :)
Hi! I'm a computational scientist by training, and I've spent an unreasonable number of years wrangling gnuplot and matplotlib to make figures look right for papers and presentations. At some point I just wanted to try to build a tool to help.
Gridpaper is a figure editor that runs entirely in your browser. Under the hood, it's gnuplot 6 compiled to WebAssembly, which means you get all that rendering power without installing anything. No account, no server, your data never leaves your machine.
The core idea is that there are no chart types. Instead you compose layers from a small set of building blocks: 12 geometric marks (curves, bars, heatmaps, vectors, surfaces…) across 5 coordinate systems. A scatter plot with a fit line isn't a special widget — it's two layers. A grouped bar chart is three bar layers in a group set to dodge. It sounds abstract, but in practice it means you can build a lot from very few pieces.
Some things worth poking at:
* The example gallery has 50 figures you can click to open in the editor
* Try importing a CSV (drag it onto the canvas)
* Switch to polar or 3D coordinates and watch the available marks change
* The design page¹ explains the compositional grammar if that sort of thing interests you
I should be upfront: it's not open source yet. I'm a solo developer and I want to get the core solid first. The plan is to open the rendering engine (the gnuplot WASM bridge and compiler) first, then the full editor.
You can find out more about me on my website: https://harishnarayanan.org