On Thu, Nov 06 2014, Daniel Carrera wrote: > On Wednesday, 5 November 2014 21:43:14 UTC+1, yaois...@gmail.com wrote: >> >> Hi all -- perhaps I am erring by necro-ing a thread from last year. >> However, this was the closest thing I found to a survey of all the plotting >> options available on Julia and I thought it wouldn't be so bad to revive >> this thread for an updated discussion. >> >> How is the field of plotting options now? Has the community started to >> gravitate to some over others? At this point, it looks like Winston and >> Gadfly are still the primary options native to Julia (and stylistically >> quite different), while PyPlot.jl pretty awesomely imports Matplotlib. >> > > > There is no "winner" at this point. I suspect that opinions differ > strongly. I once saw someone suggest that we should prefer Winton and > Gadfly because they are native Julia. I couldn't disagree more. For me > PyPlot is the only viable option because I need plots for scientific > publications (in astronomy) and I need a mature package where I can feel > confident that I can make any tweaks that my supervisor asks for. The > moment I say that I cannot do X, he will say that I should have been using > IDL instead of Julia. Winston simply does not have the maturity, range of > features and documentation of Matplotlib. My impression is that Gadfly is > more mature than Winston (maybe I am wrong) and the API is interesting, but > it is not my preferred API. Gadfly should appeal to people coming from R. I > am not coming from R.
Also, I am not sure we need a "winner". Winston and Gadly use different models, and each user could prefer one to the other without any consensus emerging. On R, I use the built-in plotting commands for simple tasks, ggplot2 for data analysis, and lattice when I need something in between, and it is not clear to me that any of them is a "winner" in the sense that it always dominates the others, even though R has been around much longer than Julia. In particular, the Grammar of Graphics model used by Gadly is powerful, but it takes a lot of investment to learn to use it effectively, and also, it may not be the best option for non-standard plots. So I hope all existing approaches will continue to thrive. Best, Tamas
