[jofer]

The normal convention is to avoid using pylab, and instead use matplotlib directly.

Pylab is handy if you're just transitioning from Matlab, but otherwise, there's no reason to use it. It's a gigantic namespace, and all but a couple of functions are from numpy and matplotlib.pyplot.

Just do:

    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Instead of:

    import pylab as pl

Of course, in the end it's personal preference. As long as you don't need to know where things come from, then using pylab is fine.