Design Philosophy
GoFish is a data-visualization library, and it starts where modern visualization does: the Grammar of Graphics (Wilkinson, and its descendants ggplot2 and Vega-Lite) — the idea that a chart is a declarative mapping from data onto visual marks. The Grammar of Graphics, together with the component-framework approach of Bluefish, is the prior GoFish set out from.
From there, GoFish is a blender. It brings three traditions to bear on visualization: programming languages & compilers, UI component frameworks, and graphic design. These traditions are not strangers to each other — graphic design and component frameworks overlap, and programming-languages ideas run deep through component frameworks. What is rare is connecting them to visualization — and rarer still to connect all three at once. That is the bet: no single one of the three is enough on its own, but the combination, brought to charts, is.
Three traditions
Programming languages & compilers. A chart is a program; the renderer is a multi-pass compiler. A large, friendly surface API desugars into a small, uniform core, and the hard passes only ever see the core. This is where GoFish gets its discipline — a small core, desugaring over special-casing, a pipeline of passes. → PL & Compilers
UI component frameworks. Marks and operators are components: declarative, composable, extensible. And GoFish lays them out the way React, SwiftUI, and Jetpack Compose lay out interfaces — linear-time local propagation over a tree, not a global constraint solver. This is where GoFish gets its composition model and its layout architecture. → UI Component Frameworks
Graphic design. A chart that is merely correct is not yet good. GoFish treats the craft of graphic design — visual hierarchy, gestalt, typography, the lineage of Bertin and Tufte — as a first-class concern, not an afterthought. → Graphic Design
Why blend them
Each tradition answers a question the other two cannot. Compilers ask: how do you keep a system tractable as its surface grows? Component frameworks ask: how do you compose graphics, and lay them out fast enough to feel instant? Graphic design asks: what makes the finished chart actually good?
A charting library needs all three answers at once. Lean only on compilers and you get something principled but cold. Lean only on component frameworks and you get something composable that still has no taste. Lean only on graphic design and you get beautiful one-offs that do not generalize. GoFish's design philosophy is the refusal to pick — and the three essays in this section are the three ingredients, one at a time.