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Comment by altairiumblue | Hacker News Reader

Jake is a great teacher - I would definitely recommend his book to people new to Python for data science, as well as any talk by him that you can find on youtube.

Also, it's kind of a shame that matplotlib is still so deeply ingrained in the Python data ecosystem.

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Why a shame? Is there something better it’s crowding out?

Assuming all you want to do is make some graphs, almost every alternative is better. Matplotlib is like the opengl of plotting libraries, there's almost no abstraction, you have to create plots in an imperative way and it's extremely verbose.

A plotting library focused on useability should let you specify what you want in a declarative manner, then get out of your way. Ggplot2 being the prime example.

The good python port is https://github.com/has2k1/plotnine/

It seems to be somewhat inspired by Matlab, which isn't an elegant system by any stretch. And for the people who hasn't had exposure to matlab, matplotlib seems overly convoluted.

Do you have any concrete examples for Python? As far as I know, ggplot2 is only for R. I would be interested to try out some alternatives to Matplotlib.

Altair (based on vega-lite) is a personal favorite. Plotnine is also a good port of ggplot.

Thanks!

Jake started Altair, a declarative visualization library that is becoming quite popular. Check it out at https://altair-viz.github.io/.

Yes. I follow him for a while. Great guy. Seems working for google now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inN8seMm7UI&t=4s

I've been enjoying Chartify quite a lot. It works well with data frames and generates gorgeous plots by default.

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