Designing composable functional libraries, not just for data visualization - Tomas Petricek

What do you do when you want to build a pretty data visualization, but none of the existing libraries quite does the thing that you want? Why, of course! You create your own data visualization library from scratch! It takes about a week until you realize that getting all the details right in data visualization is a nightmare and this was never a good idea. However, it also turns out that functional approach is a great fit for data visualization and you can build amazing visualizations with just a few lines of elegant composable code. In this talk, I will describe the design of a data visualization library Compost.js (https://compostjs.github.io/compost), which is implemented in functional way in F#, but exposes a simple JavaScript interface. I will not talk only about categorical and continuous data, projections and misleading charts, but I will extract more general principles of functional library design that you can use when tackling problems in a wide range of other domains. I will also show how you can easily build a standard JavaScript library without writing a line of JavaScript!