On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Florin Iucha wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 01:18:48PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
>
>>> Matplotlib (a python library) by default produces better-looking 
>>> graphs than R.  You can of course tweak both, but for quick graphs I 
>>> prefer the former.
>>
>> Very interesting.  Are there good screenshots somewhere?
>
> http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html
>
>   vs.
>
> http://addictedtor.free.fr/graphiques/

That's great.  Of course, in both matplotlib and R galleries we are seeing 
many graphs that are generated from a big bunch of code.  As I am 
currently pretty dedicated to continuing in-depth R studies, I'll mostly 
stick to using R for graphs, but I agree that the matplotlib graphs look 
fantastic and I wouldn't encourage a Python user to learn R just for the 
graphs!


>> Is it hard to learn to make graphs in Matplotlib starting from, say, a 
>> tab-delimited data file?
>
> Not at all:
> 
> http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/pylab_examples/scatter_demo.html

That doesn't seem to import a data file, but I'll take your word for it. 
That code is very simple (in the good sense of the word).

Mike