TextPlot seems like a good name.
Thanks for the offer on merging, but again, there's really nothing to
merge. Adding scatterplots to dotplot will be trivial; I'll do that soon
(making dotplot's features a superset of ASCIIPlots). There is nothing
compatible/overlapping between these two (small) codebases for merging to
make sense.
I would be curious what John Myles White thinks about a more complete
terminal plotting package for Julia. ASCIIPlots clearly imitates Matlab's
plotting functions ("imagesc"), and I was going for something closer to
Mathematica or Maple (which are more symbolic-oriented than Matlab), since
I think the syntax is prettier. However, I know a large portion of Julia's
users are also Matlab users, so if Matlab-compatibility is a goal, you may
want to keep the packages separate.
On Thursday, May 22, 2014 11:25:01 AM UTC-4, Leah Hanson wrote:
>
> Maybe something like TextPlot would be a good merged name? It conveys what
> the package does (text plots) rather than how it does it (Braille
> characters).
>
> Having a more complete plotting package for the terminal would move
> towards having a way to make `plot` just work when you start up a Julia
> REPL, which I think is a goal. I'd be happy to help merge them, but
> probably won't have time for a couple weeks.
>
> -- Leah
>
>
> On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 7:49 AM, Adam Smith
> <[email protected]<javascript:>
> > wrote:
>
>> I'm not totally opposed to it, but my initial reaction is not to:
>>
>> 1. I don't necessarily agree about the name. I personally think "dot
>> plot" has a nice ring to it, and it is a more accurate description of
>> what
>> it does (using Braille characters). This very specifically exploits
>> Unicode
>> (non-ASCII) characters, so calling it an ASCII plot would be misleading
>> (for those who want the restricted character set for some reason).
>> 2. There's not really a single line of code they have in common, so
>> there's nothing to "merge": it would just be a rename. I didn't look at
>> the
>> code of ASCIIPlots before making it, and we chose completely different
>> APIs. For example, ASCIIPlots doesn't have a way to plot functions, and
>> DotPlot doesn't (yet) have a way to scatterplot an array.
>> 3. They are both quite small and simple (dotplot is ~100 lines of
>> code, ascii is ~250); merging would probably be more work than either
>> originally took to create.
>>
>>
>> On Thursday, May 22, 2014 1:31:10 AM UTC-4, Ivar Nesje wrote:
>>>
>>> Would it make sense to merge this functionality into ASCIIPlots? To me
>>> that seems like a better name, and John Myles White is likely to be willing
>>> to transfer the repository if you want to be the maintainer. That package
>>> started from code posted on the mailing list, and the author thought it was
>>> a joke. John packaged it for others to use.
>>
>>
>
