[Numpy-discussion] Future directions for SciPy in light of meeting at Berkeley

[Michiel Jan Laurens de Hoon]

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.