I agree with you sfpotter, very interesting. Looks in some ways similar to PyQtGraph regarding real time plotting.
I agree with you regarding matplotlib, although I find a lot of faults/frustration in using it. Both your points on 3D plotting and WYSIWYG editor would be extremely nice and as far as I know nothing exists in python ticking these marks. For 3D I typically default to Matlab as I've found it to be the most responsive/easy to use. I've not found anything directly like a WYSIWYG editor. Stata is the closest but I deplore it, R to some extent has it but if I'm generating multiple plots it doesn't always work out.
I'm surprised by what you said about "EDA". I find the opposite, a shotgun approach, exploring a vast number of plots with various stratifications gives me better insight. I've explored plotting across multiple languages (R,python,julia,stata) and not found one that meets all my needs.
The biggest issue I often face is I have 1000 plots I want to generate that are all from separate data groups and could all be plotted in parallel but most plotting libraries have holds/issues with distribution/parallelization. The closest I've found is I'll often build up a plot in python using a Jupyter notebook. Once I'm done I'll create a function taking all the needed data/saving a plot out, then either manually or with the help of LLMs convert it to julia which I've found to be much faster in loading large amounts of data and processing it. Then I can loop it using julia's "distributed" package. Its less then ideal, threaded access would be great, rather then having to distribute the data, but I've yet to find something that works. I'd love a simple 2D EDA plotting library that has basic plots like lines, histograms (1/2d), scatter plots, etc, has basic colorings and alpha values and is able to handle large amounts (thousands to millions of points) of static data and plot it saving to disk parallelized. I've debated writing my own library but I have other priorities currently, maybe once I finish my PhD.
I agree with you regarding matplotlib, although I find a lot of faults/frustration in using it. Both your points on 3D plotting and WYSIWYG editor would be extremely nice and as far as I know nothing exists in python ticking these marks. For 3D I typically default to Matlab as I've found it to be the most responsive/easy to use. I've not found anything directly like a WYSIWYG editor. Stata is the closest but I deplore it, R to some extent has it but if I'm generating multiple plots it doesn't always work out.
I'm surprised by what you said about "EDA". I find the opposite, a shotgun approach, exploring a vast number of plots with various stratifications gives me better insight. I've explored plotting across multiple languages (R,python,julia,stata) and not found one that meets all my needs.
The biggest issue I often face is I have 1000 plots I want to generate that are all from separate data groups and could all be plotted in parallel but most plotting libraries have holds/issues with distribution/parallelization. The closest I've found is I'll often build up a plot in python using a Jupyter notebook. Once I'm done I'll create a function taking all the needed data/saving a plot out, then either manually or with the help of LLMs convert it to julia which I've found to be much faster in loading large amounts of data and processing it. Then I can loop it using julia's "distributed" package. Its less then ideal, threaded access would be great, rather then having to distribute the data, but I've yet to find something that works. I'd love a simple 2D EDA plotting library that has basic plots like lines, histograms (1/2d), scatter plots, etc, has basic colorings and alpha values and is able to handle large amounts (thousands to millions of points) of static data and plot it saving to disk parallelized. I've debated writing my own library but I have other priorities currently, maybe once I finish my PhD.