After using d3 to produce a slightly customised bar chart, this tool certainly seems more pleasant to use.

Too bad it was never actually released (as far as I know).

Some related open source projects that were released, for those who are curious:

http://aprt.us By Toby Schachman & co over at CDG

http://tonysherbondy.github.io/datadrawer/ DataDrawer, by Tony Sherbondy & co, very much directly trying to implement the tool that Bret originally demoed.

PaintCode (https://www.paintcodeapp.com/) is a drawing app that shares a few of the features of this tool. Particularly the variables and expressions feature (https://www.paintcodeapp.com/documentation/using-variables).

What book is that from 1929 that is mentioned?