Follow-up posts
I added broadcasting support: gnuplotlib and broadcasting in numpy
In the last post I talked about a gnuplot backend for numpy to make it possible to live without matplotlib. I just did quite a bit of work to port my PDL plotting library to python and numpy. The result: gnuplotlib. This is a fairly direct port, so the API and the design goals are similar. The module tries to be a thin shim between python and gnuplot, so if the user wants to do something fancy, they should read the gnuplot docs to figure out how to get the fancy thing done, and then communicate it to gnuplotlib. I see this as a good thing. Some basic examples from the main documentation:
import numpy as np import gnuplotlib as gp from scipy.constants import pi x = np.arange(101) - 50 gp.plot(x**2) [ basic parabola plot pops up ] g1 = gp.gnuplotlib(title = 'Parabola with error bars', _with = 'xyerrorbars') g1.plot( x**2 * 10, np.abs(x)/10, np.abs(x)*5, legend = 'Parabola', tuplesize = 4 ) [ parabola with x,y errobars pops up in a new window ] x,y = np.ogrid[-10:11,-10:11] gp.plot( x**2 + y**2, title = 'Heat map', cmds = 'set view map', _with = 'image', tuplesize = 3) [ Heat map pops up where first parabola used to be ] theta = np.linspace(0, 6*pi, 200) z = np.linspace(0, 5, 200) g2 = gp.gnuplotlib(_3d = True) g2.plot( (np.cos(theta), np.sin(theta), z), (np.cos(theta), -np.sin(theta), z)) [ Two 3D curves together in a new window: spirals ]
See the main docs for more. During the course of this exercise I now have a fully-formed opinion of python from a perl perspective (meh). And one of numpy from a PDL perspective (also meh). But at least they're now "standard" for some meaning of that word, so we'll see.