I’m thinking of writing a plotting library (similar to e.g. matplotlib), that calls into an existing, established library (such as matplotlib), and I can use javascript, python, C/C++, or shell. I’m plotting datasets, not functions. I need to be able to plot 2D and 3D. Which libraries should I look at?
I guess I care about
- feature set
- how intuitive it is
- how pretty the graphs are
- that it’s reasonably fast
Ggplot2 is by far the best conceptually and syntactically. It makes you think in terms of visual mappings, which is an incredible framework for understanding data viz.
Seaborn is a decent equivalent on python, but it’s more constrained by how python operates (which is a good and bad thing, R is a wild language)