&gt; &gt; And it&#x27;s really hard to beat ggplot.<p>&gt; To be honest, matplotlib seems a good contender to me (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matplotlib.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;matplotlib.org&#x2F;</a>).<p>They&#x27;re quite different, though, and I can see why many prefer ggplot. It&#x27;s a declarative, domain-specific language that implements a Tufte-inspired &quot;grammar of graphics&quot; (hence the gg- in the name; see section 1.3 of [1], and [2,3]) for very fast and convenient interactive plotting, whereas matplotlib is just a clone of MATLIB&#x27;s procedural plotting API.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0387981403" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;ggplot2-Elegant-Graphics-Data-Analysis...</a><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;The-Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Computing&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0387245448" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;The-Grammar-Graphics-Statistics-Comput...</a><p>[3] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vita.had.co.nz&#x2F;papers&#x2F;layered-grammar.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;vita.had.co.nz&#x2F;papers&#x2F;layered-grammar.html</a>