[dalke]

That is 6 years old. Some of the comments describe how matplotlib was only just then getting 3D support. Matplotlib has of course had a lot of development since then.

Also, the tools do not stand alone. The integration between pandas, matplotlib, and ipython is much greater than using gnuplot instead of matplotlib for the same situation.

Even if matplotlib doesn't handle a specific task (http://glowingpython.blogspot.com/2012/10/visualizing-correl... shows an example of plotting a correlation matrix, and one of the commenters points to http://wiki.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/HintonDiagrams ; "Hinton diagrams are a way of visualizing numerical values in a matrix/vector, popular in the neural networks and machine learning literature"), it's important to evaluate how hard is it to add that task to have the advantage of being on the well-trodden paths of Python tools.