What does HackerNews think of ggplotnim?

Well, personally as I write almost all my code in Nim and am the developer of ggplotnim [0], I simply write a source code snippet with some short Nim code, generate a plot and dump the filename into the Org file.

If I had more time and wanted something more convenient and magical, I would probably write a elisp function that takes X Y (Z) columns and generates a plot from those using a simple Nim program in the back that receives the data, generates the plot and returns it somehow. Haven't given this much thought though.

[0]: https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim

> use Python when I need graphics (Matplotlib)

I'm always open to suggestions etc. as to what's missing in ggplotnim [0]. I'd hope that by now the majority of use cases are covered.

[0]: https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim

There is NimData [1] and ggplotnim [2] and Arraymancer [3]. Also, neovim works well with the alaviss plugin [4], though it's not quite a full IDE. Most Nim coders use VS.

[1] https://github.com/bluenote10/NimData

[2] https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim

[3] https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer

[4] https://github.com/alaviss/nim.nvim

Nim has plotting, dataframe, matrix libs and even a fully featured machine learning library, I don't see the reason why it can't be used, especially by scientists.

https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim https://github.com/unicredit/neo https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer

A plotting library: https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim

If you talked to me about my PhD for a few minutes you would surely put me into your "had to reinvent the wheel for no reason" category.

As indeed, I wrote an analysis framework for my data (of a gaseous detector used for axion search) [0] instead of using an existing framework used by my predecessor. However, things are always more complicated than they seem. Many of those not talked about students who rewrite stuff probably have reasons!

In my case the existing framework [1] was a monster that was bent to allow it to work with the kind of data we have in the first place. In my case my detector had several additional features, which fit _even less_ into the existing framework. It would have been a hack and still a significant amount of work to make it work well.

To be fair, when I started this I expected it to be less work than it ended up being. But that's the story of software development.

The advantages now are significant of course. I know the whole codebase. It does exactly what I want. I can extend it easily as I see fit.

That doesn't mean I didn't also partly procrastinate writing software. Far from it. Hell, there was no reason to write a freaking plotting library (a sort of port of ggplot2 for Nim) [3]. But again, this means my thesis will have plots created natively using a TikZ backend while at the same time provide links to Vega-Lite plots for each and every plot in my thesis (which of course will include the data for each plot!).

Finally, the most important point: A university / professor who only pays me for 20h a week does not get to tell me how I do my PhD.

[0]: https://github.com/Vindaar/TimepixAnalysis [1]: https://ilcsoft.desy.de/portal/software_packages/marlintpc/ [2]: https://github.com/Vindaar/ggplotnim