On: Gnuplotlib: A gnuplot-based plotting backend for N...

[Silphendio]

Matplotlib isn't very friendly to casual users.

For even the simplest possible plot, I have to create a subplot and axis.

Sometimes I'd like to just plot a function. I don't want to initialize arrays for that.

It's easy to forget that I have to `import matplotlib.pyplot`

I don't need to plot things often, but whenever I use matplotlib, I always have to spend a few minutes to look up how to use it.

[coldtea → Silphendio]

>For even the simplest possible plot, I have to create a subplot and axis.

So? Can't that be abstracted away once in a custom lib, of the 3-4 plots you use 99% of the time, and be done with it?

In which case, you just need to pass in your data and labels, in a specific format, and that's it.

[enriquto → coldtea]

> So? Can't that be abstracted away once in a custom lib, of the 3-4 plots you use 99% of the time, and be done with it?

This does not beat gnuplot's simplicity where you don't even need to define that.

The following line is a complete gnuplot program to plot the sine function:

    plot sin(x)

Every parameter of the plot has reasonable defaults, and you can redefine all of them as you wish.

[chaps → coldtea]

"that can be abstracted away in a custom lib"

Yeah, and that's really not helpful for sharing code or doing exploratory charting. It's never, ever as simple as just "being done with it".

vega-lite-api is my charting library of choice these days. Much simpler than gnuplot, d3, matplotlib, etc.

[greendayle → Silphendio]

import pylab as pb

x = np.arange(0, 10, 0.01)

pb.plot(x, np.sin(x)

pb.show()

what do you mean hard?

[analog31 → greendayle]

This is a minor source of confusion. Pylab and Pyplot are packages within Matplotlib. They are what most casual users experience when they say that they're using Matplotlib. I use them, they're convenient.

A minor headache is when you have to break out of Pyplot to use some of the more detailed behaviors of Matplotlib, and now you're interacting with both Pyplot and the lower level calls. For instance, plt.title('foo') and gca().set_title('foo') do the same thing.

If you're a fluent programmer, you fly past those seeming inconsistencies with barely any notice. Explaining them to a novice programmer is harder.