Is there anything that does for Mathematica what matplotlib does for MATLAB?
matplotlib, even in its underlying so-called "OO mode", follows MATLAB's graphics model, which, in my very subjective opinion, is vastly inferior to Mathematica's. The latter allows for a clean separation between the textual specification of a graphic object (which can be very complex), and its graphic representation. Furthermore, it is general enough to allow for the composition of graphic objects within other graphic objects, to arbitrary depth levels. This readily allows for the representation of complex composite figures that are common in scientific publishing today, where figures not only routinely consist of several subfigures, but the subfigures themselves contain mutliple sub-subfigures, and so on. (In contrast, matplotlib supports at most two levels of composition [a two-dimensional array of sub-plots], which is both too inflexible and too limited.) More generally, despite its usefulness, I find MATLAB in the end to be one big ugly hack, so, as a developer, I would prefer to stay clear of anything that is modeled after MATLAB, however loosely. Any pointers to something more Mathematica-like in Python would be appreciated. TIA! kj -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
