I’m not familiar with code.golf but I wonder how whitespace is handled? I find python is very concise anyway, but I wonder how the white space is counted (single tab, four spaces for black, etc).

Just about everything is modifiable in matplotlib… It may not be easy, but all plotting libraries are designed to make some things easy at the expense of making other tasks more difficult. For matplotlib you just have to think about things the way matlab thinks about things… which is more computer graphics based. It can get ugly until you understand it. But if you understand how any plotting library actually works it’s not that bad. All plotting libraries ultimately are built on graphical primitives like lines and fonts and triangles and patches computing where things belong by transforming coordinates and feeding them to a layout engine. It’s not as magical as the APIs make them seem. So if you’re willing to dig into their bowels (as OP mentions) there really aren’t any many limits. Sometimes it’s actually easiest to just declare a canvas in memory and draw it all by hand. Ultimately, things are either vector or raster formats (or some abstraction that supports both) and fed into some computer graphics engine (like postscript or some OS’s or GPU canvas).

Anyway, sometimes the easiest answer is you export and edit the labels in the final figure. One really nasty way if you don’t have PS or PDF tools is to sidetrack through Windows EMF and mess with fonts and positioning of text in PowerPoint.

For the types of visualizations you’re describing, the choice probably won’t matter. I view matplotlib as “matlab flavor” and ggplot2 as “R flavor”. For R-type work (a certain type of table-based stats) I just use R.

For matlab type work (image processing, simulations, etc) I now use matplotlib. This is mostly numpy/scipy things rather than… pandas things. Python is interesting because it has things that are beyond matplotlib (VTK, etc) and beyond matlab. Typically when you’re prototyping in matlab you’re assuming you will have to rewrite in a different system eventually, but with python you can move the prototype further down to more polished prototype easily.

I do a lot of image processing and am too familiar with matlab, so matplotlib generally came naturally for translating that prior knowledge. So really it depends on what sorts of things you are familiar with, languages you use, and would want to do in the future. I think with either choice you will eventually hit some wall of difficulty.

There are also more visualization and plot focused things (TeX family or PostScript and PDF) as well as the “processing” language.

I use R for… not-image-type analysis stats and generate plots in R using R’s plotting. I mostly use python for matlab-type things and matplotlib seems more natural for that.

Julia is on my todo-list and I have heard good things about their plotting ecosystem but I have not looked into it.

Incidentally VTK is extremely well designed for the type of language it’s based on and the problems its solving… but that’s not really 2D plotting.

Leverage for what purpose? To fix reddit? Let reddit die or not die.

Reddit has always come after mirrors and they will easily get courts to take down the instances. Don’t forget that prior to the API change they came after pushshift.

Additionally, anyone mirroring reddit on the moral basis that the content is owned by the creators and reddit is an exploitative rentseeker, has an obligation to not become a rentseeker themselves. This means things like ensuring that content that users voluntarily delete is also deleted in the mirrors. Reddit in fact had a large battle with pushshift about this years ago such that pushshift supposedly now only keeps history of moderator and admin edits. I agree with that ethically.

And in many cases you may be legally required to do this. To be clear Reddit made pushshift change to respecting user delete requests because of legal exposure and compliance risks.

Not to mention that you don’t really know that anyone intends their content to be mirrored on sites they do not use. Particularly now that Reddit seems to be forcing private subreddits to be open. There’s no moral high ground for doing this.

I don’t like the idea. It seems like those fake websites that scrape stackoverflow and SEO to ruin Google search. Avoiding those sites are among the reasons people type “reddit” into searches. People want authentic interactions and I think mirroring reddit into Fediverse lacks authenticity and undermines its authenticity. Content here should be from people who are here.

If someone wants to assimilate content from reddit into something new and post it here that’s good. That means the person is here and can be interacted with.

If someone wants to repost their own content here, that’s also fine. They are here to interact with.

I just really think it’s a bad idea to deliberately build a ghost town and think people will move in.