Scientific computing and data visualization.

[Fabian Braennstroem]

Hi Bernhard,

* bernhard.voigt at gmail.com <bernhard.voigt at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I can definitively second that. ROOT is a bit hard to learn but very,
>> > very powerful and PyRoot is really a pleasure to work with.
>>
>> It sounds interesting. Right now, I use matplotlib for
>> 2D plotting and vtk for 3D. Do you have any experience and
>> can give some recommendations?
>
> Hi Fabian!
>
> I recommend using matplotlib for data visualization, because the usage
> of the plotting commands is much(!!!) more convenient. In ROOT you have
> to create objects before you can draw your diagrams. The constructor
> often requires arguments about the number of space points, axis length,
> name etc. On the other hand, the figure itself has a GUI to manipulate
> the plot, which sometimes is nicer than doing everything in the script.
> In particular the 3D visualization seems to be more comprehensive (lots
> of drawing options, rotation of the plot with the mouse, changing of
> visualization lego, surf, contour plots etc.).
>
> ROOT has more than plotting. For example it has a whole bunch of
> containers to store very large amounts of data (within complex
> datastructures), fitting routines, minimizers etc. But you get that
> with scipy and numpy.
>
> I'm using 80% of the time matplotlib because it's much quicker for
> quick glances at your data. If I need sophisitcated 3D plots, I use
> ROOT, but I would love to switch to matplotlib for this, as well.
>
> My guess is that using python and matplotlib with scipy speeds up my
> work by at least 30% in comparison to using purely ROOT (and code in
> C++). And even 10-15% in comparison to the usage of ROOT with pyRoot.

Thanks for your advice!

Greetings!
 Fabian