[analog31]

Matplotlib has been working fine for me. Some caveats. I'm a physicist working in industry, and don't publish in academic journals. But I do a huge amount of data visualization, for my own use, and to produce graphs for internal reports.

The graphs look as good to my eye as what I see in papers, but I have no idea what extra steps are needed to satisfy each journal's style guide.

Before Matplotlib, I created graphs in Excel.

A possible question is whether Matplotlib deserves the status of being the default for teaching scientific programming in Python, or if a different tool would make it easier for beginners.