Plotnine

#1

Post by tosh » Fri, Jun 19, 2026, 9:08 AM UTC

Plotnine
plotnine.org

Re: Plotnine

#2

Post by jstanley » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 8:20 AM UTC

Using operator overloading of "+" to configure the plot is... a choice.

Re: Plotnine

#3

Post by jamessb » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 8:31 AM UTC

jstanley wrote: post #2

Using operator overloading of "+" to configure the plot is... a choice.

Plotnine is heavily inspired by the ggplot2 library, which uses the + operator in the same way: https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/#usage

Re: Plotnine

#4

Post by domoritz » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 8:32 AM UTC

For another grammar-of-graphics-based visualization library (flexibly compose charts rather than simply pick a template), check out Altair https://altair-viz.github.io.

Re: Plotnine

#5

Post by piqufoh » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 8:36 AM UTC

`from plotnine import *`

... I love the idea of a new python plotting library, but why is this anti-pattern so common with plotting libs?

Re: Plotnine

#6

Post by jamessb » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 8:38 AM UTC

piqufoh wrote: post #5

`from plotnine import *` ... I love the idea of a new python plotting library, but why is this anti-pattern so common with plotting libs?

> a new python plotting library

Whilst it's still not yet at 1.0.0, it's not that new: the first (0.1.0) release was in 2017: https://pypi.org/project/plotnine/#history

Re: Plotnine

#7

Post by globular-toast » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 8:38 AM UTC

Back when I did a lot of data stuff I used ggplot in R because it seemed to be popular, but I was just copy/pasting examples. Then one day I finally started to "get it" and actually read the manual. Learning the grammar of graphics was like a super power. I got to the point I could open pretty much anything people sent me and visualise it in a matter of seconds.

Although I've used Python professionally a lot more than R, I still felt like R was better at this. Somehow opening files in Python always feels a bit more "heavy". I don't really know why, though.

Re: Plotnine

#8

Post by globular-toast » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 8:41 AM UTC

piqufoh wrote: post #5

`from plotnine import *` ... I love the idea of a new python plotting library, but why is this anti-pattern so common with plotting libs?

Because it's aimed at data scientists who would rather be using R...

Re: Plotnine

#9

Post by qrobit » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 9:01 AM UTC

And it comes with tidyverse-like cheatsheet[1] that I confused with ggplot2 when first discovered plotnine

[1]: https://github.com/rstudio/cheatsheets/blob/main/plotnine.pd...

Re: Plotnine

#10

Post by LoganDark » Tue, Jun 23, 2026, 9:07 AM UTC

jamessb wrote: post #6

piqufoh wrote: post #5

`from plotnine import *` ... I love the idea of a new python plotting library, but why is this anti-pattern so common with plotting libs?

> a new python plotting library Whilst it's still not yet at 1.0.0, it's not that new: the first (0.1.0) release was in 2017: https://pypi.org/project/plotnine/#history

matplotlib's first release was in 2003, making it more than twice as old.