Travis Oliphant wrote:
1) Plotting -- scipy's plotting wasn't good enough (we knew that) and the promised solution (chaco) took too long to emerge as a simple replacement. While the elements were all there for chaco to work, very few people knew that and nobody stepped up to take chaco to the level that matplotlib, for example, has reached in terms of cross-gui applicability and user-interface usability.
I actually looked at Chaco before I started working on pygist (which is now also included in SciPy, I think). My impression was that Chaco was under active development by enthought, and that they were not looking for developers to join in. When Chaco didn't come through, I tried several plotting packages for python that were around at the time, some of which were farther along than Chaco. In the end, I decided to work on pygist instead because it was already working (on unix/linux, at least) and seemed to be a better starting point for a cross-platform plotting package, which pygist is today. The other point is that different plotting packages have different advantages and disadvantages, so you may not be able to find a plotting package that suits everybody's needs. --Michiel.