mmplot

mmplot: multimethod plotting, pronounced "mmm mmm plot" like "mmm mmm that tastes good"

This is mostly an excersise in what would be an ideal object oriented and multiple-dispatch centered plotting package for R. The features I would like are:

• don't have to read a 600+ page book about grammer to understand why I'm writing some code to make a plot
• don't have to memorize a bunch of random-sounding functions to make a plot
• I want to say plot(object) and have it make the appropriate plot for that object
• the defaults (and I can't stress this enough) SHOULD LOOK GOOD
• there should be consistent sizing across devices
  • if I save to PDF the fonts should look the same as saaving to JGP
  • if I resize the plot, the sizes of plot elements should change proportionately
  • there should be no more of this bs that if I render a plot in an md doc that making the graphic device smaller leads to bigger font!!!
• the multiple dispatch for things like phylogenies, geospatial data, timeseries, expressions should be pretty simple, it might be more hard for a lot of the "core" graphics, e.g.,
  • how do you specify how a data.frame should be plotted? it shouldn't always be a scatter plot, maybe we barrow a few ideas from the gg world (but let's please not call them cryptic names like aes)
  • do you need to define new classes for scatterplot, boxplot, etc?
  • then we make the object like x <- scatterplot(data, ...) and the plot it plot(x)???
  • or do we do like plot(<put data.frame here>, x = <col_name>, y = <col_name or function>, ...)?
  • where y is optional and could be left out (in which case it guesses what plot you want), or it could be a column (make a scatter plot) or it could be a function (e.g. hist it makes a histogram)
• the plot itself (i.e. the output of plot) should be an object, similar to ggplot in this way
• each element of the plot should also be an object with robust classes
  • e.g. x-axis inherits from axis, which has properties like range, transformation, ticks, etc
  • e.g. "the data" should be a copy of the object passed to plot
  • e.g. the plotting symbols should be of a class (like point inherits from a generic symbol or something) and have properties like line width, relative size, etc
  • e.g. the plotting region (versus the whole device) should be an object of class, e.g., canvas
• it would be dope if the plots render in viewer and we could have a GUI that lets users identify what each component is (like click on something and a window pops up showing the name of the element, its class, and some example code to manipulate it, almost like what you would get typing ?class-name but you see it when clicking on the object in the plot