[throwaway4007]

But I want ggplot to do magic. Rendering things is extremely tedious and boring. I don't want to spend hours on stackoverflow searching for the special obscure incantations that will shift the legend and margins this way because matplotlib did an ugly job while constantly adapting boilerplate back and forth between the declarative and object-oriented API, I want it to just do what I mean!

Is there any coincidence that there are literally tens of different (and concurrent) rendering libraries for Python while the R world more or less settled for ggplot2? Writing matplotlib is such a pain in the ass that people go to great lengths to actually avoid using matplotlib (while still not having the expressivity, features and ease of use of ggplot2).

Magic is bad when you're shipping production code that's shared among multiple people who have to then spend a lot of time assimilating the mental model of the magic. It's perfect when you just want to plot stuff and draw nice figures.

[phillc73]

Base R plot() can also be pretty powerful[1] and look great.[2] As an alternative to ggplot2 I would also propose that Vega Lite[3] could be a contender, with an excellent cross language ecosystem.

[1] http://karolis.koncevicius.lt/posts/r_base_plotting_without_...

[2] https://github.com/KKPMW/basetheme

[3] https://vegawidget.github.io/vlbuildr/