plotting

[gusl]

Amazingly, my last memory of using a programming language to plot graphs is with VisualBasic, circa 2001. Since then, I played with Matlab or R once or twice, but in all of my experiences with real programming languages (Perl, Lisp, Java), I do not recall plotting anything.

As a result, the only tool I know how to use is Matlab, which is annoyingly proprietary (and even that is rusty).

Comments

My 5 cents

[vi-z.livejournal.com]

Have you tried numpy etc? Seems to be a very comfortable matlab replacement.

[figuraleffect.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Use R. Really. It takes a while to get back into this stuff (I once tried to manipulate data using Haskell - what a ridiculous idea!) but then after a while life becomes sweet :-)

[figuraleffect.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, and join this mailing list (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/archives/psych-r.html) and ask lots of questions---it's a bit dead.

MHO

[stepleton.livejournal.com]

Everyone I know who's had to deal with R seems to have found it to be a Royal pain in the Rear, especially with respect to confusing error messages and documentation. That consensus is a few years old, though, and I haven't really used it myself.

MATLAB does make life pretty easy, even if it makes PL people ill. Mathematica does well if you have equations (i.e. not lists of numerical data), especially if sometimes the y values can be really big.

The learning curve for figuring out how to get MATLAB to plot in that one precise way that you're trying to plot your data can sometimes be a bit steep. Usually by the time this becomes an issue, you're dealing with plotting facilities that MATLAB has and free clones like Octave do not.

I can't speak for NumPy. I needed a sparse eigensolver---it didn't have one, so I learned MATLAB instead!

[zarex.livejournal.com]

You should consider Octave/GNUplot; it's basically a Matlab clone.