[rwxrwxrwx]

I always find it easier to produce publication-quality figures using gnuplot (but not with its defaults settings, mind you) than with Matplotlib. Check out http://gnuplotting.org/

Also, it's hard to beat gnuplot's speed refreshing a live scatter plot with many thousands of points using the x11 terminal.

[a-nikolaev]

I'm using gnuplot for plotting too (the actual gnuplot application not a library that uses gnuplot as its backend).

And I usually keep computation and plotting separate. Computation produces data files, and a gnuplot script generates plots. This separation of computation and plotting allows updating charts later if needed, collected data can be reused in other plots, and additional data analysis can be performed and charts can be augmented.

So I personally don't see many advantages from integrating chart generation into computational pipeline itself (except for computation monitoring or maybe when user response is needed to direct computation). Because of that, libraries that encourage charts generation from a computed array instead of dumping that data into persisted files feels like an anti-pattern to me.

[steve_gh]

Completely aeree. I keen computation steps (which create csv files) separate from charting steps. I use make to orchestrate pipelines. I also keep everything under source control, and insert git commit ids into every chart. This ensures that all the analysis and charts can be linked directly to the code used to produce them.

[kasperset]

Somewhat agree but sometimes there is need to change/filter the data that goes into making the chart which is only realized after plotting it. Combining data and the figures into one "pipeline" makes it easy to iterate especially with exploratory data analysis. Regardless, this comment made me think about my general workflow which is usually combined. Appreciate this comment.