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Tangentially related: there's a port of ggplot to python: http://ggplot.yhathq.com/

The problem with ggplot and friends is R. It's frankly painful and archaic to work with.

Without needing to get into an R vs Python discussion I think it is fair to say that this is a perfectly valid subjective opinion and that a lot of people will disagree completely... none of the ggplot2 Python ports holds a candle to the original, feature-wise. So the question is whether you will reach out for the lesser tool or learn a new programming style...

I'm not a big Python fan, frankly. But R is painful enough for me to keep looking around. Right now my workflow is to do all my data processing in another language and just use R for plotting.

With dplyr & purrr, if you can't find a DSL in R that works for you, the odds are you'll need lisp or Haskell to satisfy you.

With the Apache Arrow project, my understanding is that there will be an opportunity for languages like R, Python w/Pandas to share in-memory dataframe structures. I could imagine a future world where much tighter interaction with languages like lisps or Haskell.

Haskell is what I use.

Base R is painful. dplyr isn't.

True, but 90% of the work in most data processing is before you can use dplyr or the rest of the tidyverse.

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