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Comment by heywhatupboys | Hacker News Reader

> What? Matplotlib has the best, intuitive interface among the competition. Every other plotting library I have tried either leads to ridiculously verbose code or is too opinionated to be useful.

What??? Have you ever used ggplot?? I know we all have opinions, but yikes, just look at the tutorials!

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The parent comment may find matplotlib approachable because they are a programmer already. A lot of science people are not programmers. So when they have to choose between matplotlib, where you will need to understand OOP, and ggplot, where you can get away with not knowing what a class is, its pretty clear which one is more accessible.

It’s not the programming. Every default in matplotlib is poor. You have to write about ten times more lines of code to get something clean with legible fonts and minimal, understandable aesthetics. Very few people bother and then you get presentations full of ugly, time-wasting plots. Ggplot2 makes it harder to obfuscate your intent and very easy to experiment with different aesthetics and fix up the style of your plot. Yes it is opinionated, because, thankfully, there exist a good set of useful ideas for communicating data analyses.

The matplotlib defaults are poor, but you can import the style class from matplotlib and apply decent defaults

> from matplotlib import style > style.use([…])

I’m on vacation away from a computer so hopefully that snippet is close enough that you can Google it.

Mmmm, ggplot has better defaults but I am still impressed by how bad the plots some people produce are. Absolutely agree on ggplot's ease of use, but that is partly a consequence of not needing to know how to program to use it.

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