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Comment by AndyMcConachie | Hacker News Reader

Having recently completed a data analysis project I'd say the biggest thing that made me choose R was its ability to make really pretty graphs easily.

I have a lot of experience with Python doing all sorts of programming. This was my first R program and I don't regret it. The libraries in R(ggplot2) for making pretty graphs are much better than anything I could find for Python.

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Having spent lots of time recently looking at vis in both Python and R (I use both), I'm starting to think Vega lite may well be the future.

In Python, you can use Altair [0] and in R you can use the vegalite package [1]. Note also that R's ggvis uses vega under the hood.

[0] https://github.com/altair-viz/altair

[1] https://github.com/hrbrmstr/vegalite

Statisticians need to make figures; most programmers, most of the time, don't. The tools reflect this :-)

ggplot2 no longer has the pretty pictures field to itself. Python's matplotlib does great graphs too. Javascripts d3.js does similar. And there are other libraries as well.

For static images to put into a PDF, maybe it doesn't matter what you use, but when you see the ease of creating interactive data exploration graphs on a web server using d3.js and its ecosystem, you will be pleasantly surprised.

Lattice is also very good. It's very similar to ggplot2 but I find the plots to be significantly better looking.

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