Plotting example at https://lisp-stat.dev/docs/tutorials/plotting/ does not work

[ajberkley]

Two issues, first is that firefox no longer seems to allow file:///tmp/plot/hp-mpg.html be opened as configured by default on Ubuntu. You need to move the file to ~/Documents to open it, or do some other configuration magic which I can't figure out.

Second, the example (image below) has (vega:defplot hp-mpg ... :data (:values ,vgcars)...) which seems to no longer be the usage --- this dies with column-length being called on a data-frame. Removing the :values and just doing :data vgcars lets it work.

[snunez1]

What version of plot are you using? In Plot 1.x the data key worked like that. This was changed in Plot 2.0 so that we can include the data key in multiple places in the plot.

[ajberkley]

I'm using the latest from quicklisp --- so probably good to update the documentation examples?

[snunez1]

Quicklisp is infrequently updated these days, and that can make it challenging with a fast-moving project like lisp-stat (well, fast moving by CL standards). The documentation was updated for version 2.0 already.

I'd suggest a few things:

• If you're going to be working with lisp-stat at this level, download the source rather than rely on Quicklisp. Quicklisp can be used to get the dependencies, but the lisp-stat source should be local and checked out from github. There's a bash script in the documentation for doing this.
• Check the specific ASDF system version for Plot and make certain you're at version 2 or higher.
• Use Linux when working with lisp-stat. Originally all the work was done in MS Windows and a lot of effort was spent in making sure it would run properly there. That proved to be too much work and I'm now shifting all dev work to Linux in devcontainers.

Also, as an FYI, don't bother with sqldf. That system is deprecated and is going to be replaced with clsql.