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by cauthon 2533 days ago
Are all the plotting/visualization options still half baked?
2 comments

I've found Plots.jl and PyPlots.jl to work well for most basic things, despite not always being entirely pleasant to use, for example the compilation time issue, but this should hopefully improve. The only real problem I had is that these are not quite sufficient for plots to be published in a paper, many visual tweaks you might want are broken or terribly documented, and I have to just use matplotlib or R. It is generally great for jupyter notebooks though. I see the current deficiencies as highlighting just how much work went into matplotlib and others to get where they are today (and even mpl is in some ways still lacking, for example 3D surfaces and meshes). It is unfortunate though, as plotting is a core functionality for their main target of computational science. But to answer your question, mostly yes. Everything seems to be slowly improving though.
No matter the tool I use these days for plotting, I export it as a .tex file to use PGFPlots. matlab2tikz, matplotlib2tikz, and the savefig function in Plots.jl all do the job (with the pgfplots backend). This way you can tweak the figure in the final document, which I prefer. You can adjust all of the properties of the plot in Latex.
Yes, they are. Slow and hardly as expressive or rich as python/r counterparts.
One can use matplotlib in Julia by PyCall'ing it. So it is at least as good as anything else.
Or ggplot2 using RCall, which is what I use and it's quite nice.