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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ditto. Awfully convoluted compared to, say, R.
odd how it's still the de facto standard python library for plots despite much better libraries like ggplot or plotly
Pgfplots produces highest quality plots that I have seen.
It's a great library. I only wish that it didn't have two completely different, incompatible interfaces to muddy the documentation, examples, and SO answer threads.
MATLAB's plotting is not the best, but it's familiar to MATLAB legacy folks, who made up many of the early folks who moved over to Numpy, Matplotlib, SciPy. It was a bridge.
Pgfplots produces highest quality plots that I have seen.
I find Pgfplots quite hacky since TeX is really not made for handling data (it doesn't even support floating-point arithmetic). A much cleaner solution is to enable LaTeX text rendering in Matplotlib ( https://matplotlib.org/stable/users/explain/text/usetex.html ). In this way, TeX is used for what it is good at (text rendering), and everything else is handled by Matplotlib.
Pgfplots produces highest quality plots that I have seen.
I find Pgfplots quite hacky since TeX is really not made for handling data (it doesn't even support floating-point arithmetic). A much cleaner solution is to enable LaTeX text rendering in Matplotlib ( https://matplotlib.org/stable/users/explain/text/usetex.html ). In this way, TeX is used for what it is good at (text rendering), and everything else is handled by Matplotlib.
Pgfplots produces highest quality plots that I have seen.
can you provide some links to examples so we can see what you mean
However, examples from pgfplots and matplotlib should be considered in a paper, together with the effort in preparing and revising the figures.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And when I use matplotlib it's to clean up some non-default tweaks to seaborn plots. Refactorability here means that it's easy to go from one plot into one that's split into facets (multiple subplots etc.)
true, the subplot api is especially painful because i have to edit each line of code i copy-paste to give it a different subplot number
The name and API come from MATLAB, and once you realize that it makes more sense. It was originally meant to replicate the plotting functionality in python to be familiar to MATLAB users. IMO this is what makes it feel non-pythonic, but it was never really a python API in the first place.
What about it? Are you trying to point to something specific?
I haven’t used matplotlib in a while (also because I wasn’t fluid with it) and now am using it regularly in Code Interpreter w/ GPT-4. Now I’m thinking there must be many more libraries that are now “in reach” for me for casual use which weren’t just a few weeks ago.
Matplotlib is a fantastic library even if I don’t love the API. The name and API come from MATLAB, and once you realize that it makes more sense. It was originally meant to replicate the plotting functionality in python to be familiar to MATLAB users. IMO this is what makes it feel non-pythonic, but it was never really a python API in the first place.
Between matplotlib and pandas I believe we have a sufficient explanation as to how python became the language of choice for data analysis.