ggplot2 writer

[teunbrand]

I think we all agree that if you work in R, people should probably use ggplot2, but it might be nice to write to ggplot2 for a few reasons:

1. If you want the plot declaration to match across languages. (i.e. you work in R, but collaborator works in SQL, you use ggsql as lingua franca)
2. You want to tweak plots with ggplot2 exclusive functionality, such as that provided by the extension ecosystem.
3. You want the database backend to avoid materialising data for summaries (and are unfamiliar with dbplyr).
   4. In the far future, archeologists will excavate GitHub's arctic vault on the Svalbart islands and find ggsql as the Rosetta's stone of GoG plotting syntax.

[teunbrand]

Similar to how the vegalite writer returns a spec, it might be interesting to have the ggplot2 writer return an R script that users then can run.

[georgestagg]

Similar to how the vegalite writer returns a spec, it might be interesting to have the ggplot2 writer return an R script that users then can run.

There was also some chatter on the HN thread about how we could emit our own spec, an IR (Intermediate Representation) that can then be lowered to vegalite, ggplot2 R script, etc.

[teunbrand]

Isn't that what the VISUALISE clause is?

[thomasp85]

We have chatted on and off about this around the block... I'm honestly not entirely sure we should go that way, unless we are talking a binary representation of the Plot object...

Anyway, this is not the venue to discuss it