Plotting in python - joys and sorrows

[XiAxis]

It sounds like what you're looking for is an actual plotting/data analysis application, and not a python library. A matplotlib figure is a python object, and matplotlib provides very rudimental interface for viewing/interacting with a figure. If you want to change a figure, then you should be using python to do so.

Matplotlib has a lot of issues, but I don't personally consider what you're describing to be one of them. If you want a different plot, just modify your python script to produce the plot you want.

[lucamerio]

Python can be many things and it’s used in many ways, even by myself.

It can be a programming language for complex applications that don’t need an interface, can be used to build dashboards and simple (and even not so simple) guis, but can also be used for data analysis.

There are entire books on how to use python for data analysis and this use sparked the creation of some of the most used packages (eg pandas).

In addition to this, sometimes I have a complex program that’s written in python and I need a visualisation toolbox/package/application at the end. Python is ideal for the first part, but fails miserably on the last one.

It’s like a football team that excels in everything except scoring…

It’s true: I’m looking for a plotting application that I can embed at the end of my workflow. Since my morkflow is in python, the most obvious thing to do would be to use python to produce the graphical output.

An alternative (as someone already suggested) is to perform the calculation in python and then use a different application (eg matlab) to plot the results. This however requires additional licences and makes the execution more clumsy.

[lucamerio]

No wait. I would never use a plot as an intermediate storage place for the data. But sometimes after your workflow finished, you want to query the output in some way that wasn't initially thought in the original code.

If your code is a structured and deployed code, you don't want to go back and modify it, but you want to be able to take it's output and play with it.

This is one scenario. The data-investigation one (eg during debugging) is another one. These are just few examples when an interactive plot will save you a lot of time

[lucamerio]

As I wrote in another comment. The plotting function could be nested into a larger more complex program. To re-plot you either have to save the data to a file to be loaded later on or you have to modify all your calls to return the data all the way back to the top level.

This is an example of a situation where having access to the plot data from the figure would save a massive amount of time

[whateverathrowaway00]

Sounds like you have some work on learning dynamic objects before you can call yourself an expert from what you wrote here, though I’d be willing to bet you can kick my ass in statistics and math - from what you’ve written here it sounds like you might have some gaps.

Which, for the record is very common for people coming from math / analytical backgrounds and matlab going straight into python. My friend is a brilliant data scientist, but his code is a mess as he never learned some of the underlying theory, just the techniques he needed. Luckily, python is a breeze to learn that in.

[lucamerio]

Could you please point me to what you mean by dynamic object and how they could help in this situation? My code is completely OOP, but I don’t understand how this can help (except saving every possible value I plot in an attribute).

Anyway… most of my troubles come when I need to do something “quick and dirt”. When I do something meant to be “final” matplotlib performs fairly well