Visualization programmers<\/a> need a close-to-the-hardware, powerful 2D and 3D graphics toolkit to create applications that handle large amounts of data well. OpenGL<\/a> is the most portable system for 3D graphics card programming, and thus is a common language for many visualization applications. Scott Dillard has said of the OpenGL graphics library bindings in Haskell:<\/p>\n The library is fantastic. I don\u2019t think it gets enough fanfare. The only other GL API<\/a> that rivals it is the C API itself. Most other languages provide a shoddy and incomplete interface to that, instead of an idiomatic interpretation of the OpenGL specification. I can\u2019t think of a single language, not even Python, whose OpenGL bindings come close.<\/p>\n OpenGL is powerful, but it can also be more complicated than actually necessary. For applications involving 2D graphics, a low amount of interactivity, and a smaller amount of data, it would be simpler not to bother with the video card and the rendering pipeline. Additionally, some visualizations are meant for print form. The Gnome Foundation\u2019<\/a>s Cairo 2D graphics toolkit is perfect for these applications. As luck would have it, Haskell also has an excellent binding to Cairo.<\/p>\n Three other things make Haskell ideally suited to information visualization and visual analytics: a well-thought out and extensible library of generic data structures, lazy evaluation, and the separation of data transformation code from input\/output inherent in a pure functional programming language. Visualizations written in Haskell tend naturally to break up into portions of reusable and visualization specific code. Thus, programs for visualization written in Haskell maintain readability and reusability as well or better than Python, but do not suffer the performance problems of an interpreted language.<\/p>\n