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As a ROOT guru and occasional pythonist, I recommend PyROOT especially if you want to interactively explore what you're plotting.

by cozzyd 8y ago

thicknavyrain 8y ago
Does anyone outside of High Energy Physics use ROOT? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious, I'm a physicist by day so seeing ROOT talked about on here amongst popular libraries is like someone recommending my local pub as the best in town.
- whorleater 8y ago
  I used root in astrophysics for a couple things, but that's hardly outside it's intended audience. yt is generally considered to be easier to pick up now instead though.
  - noobermin 8y ago
    yt is magnitudes better than root that putting them in the same sentence is as sensible as comparing apples to jurisprudence.
    - cozzyd 8y ago
      ROOT and yt have quite different domains (although it's probably possible for each to emulate the other...) so I'm not sure it makes sense to compare them.
noobermin 8y ago
Oh dear god please no. Root is a pain back when I looked at it.
MereInterest 8y ago
As someone who used to use ROOT, I would strongly recommend against it. Its C++ implementation has all manner of hidden state, and this leaks into PyROOT. For example, ROOT has the concept of ownership, entirely distinct from the python sense of references. A file owns the histograms that were read from it. Closing the file changes all references to histograms read from that file to None. It took a large amount of digging to figure out how that was even possible (overwriting an existing object from within the C API), but I cannot for the life of me understand why. ROOT has way too many gotchas for me to ever recommend it.
- cozzyd 8y ago
  Yeah it has a lot of state that's not very pythonic (and I almost always use it from c++ or cling) but it is very good for semiinteractive plotmaking that's not possible in something like matplotlib. A lot of ROOT's legacy from the 90's shows, but ROOT6 has made a lot of progress.

As a ROOT guru and occasional pythonist, I recommend PyROOT especially if you want to interactively explore what you're plotting.

by cozzyd 8y ago

As a ROOT guru and occasional pythonist, I recommend PyROOT especially if you want to interactively explore what you're plotting.

thicknavyrain 8y ago

Does anyone outside of High Energy Physics use ROOT? I'm not trying to be argumentative, I'm genuinely curious, I'm a physicist by day so seeing ROOT talked about on here amongst popular libraries is like someone recommending my local pub as the best in town.

whorleater 8y ago
I used root in astrophysics for a couple things, but that's hardly outside it's intended audience. yt is generally considered to be easier to pick up now instead though.
- noobermin 8y ago
  yt is magnitudes better than root that putting them in the same sentence is as sensible as comparing apples to jurisprudence.
  - cozzyd 8y ago
    ROOT and yt have quite different domains (although it's probably possible for each to emulate the other...) so I'm not sure it makes sense to compare them.

noobermin 8y ago

Oh dear god please no. Root is a pain back when I looked at it.

MereInterest 8y ago

As someone who used to use ROOT, I would strongly recommend against it. Its C++ implementation has all manner of hidden state, and this leaks into PyROOT. For example, ROOT has the concept of ownership, entirely distinct from the python sense of references. A file owns the histograms that were read from it. Closing the file changes all references to histograms read from that file to None. It took a large amount of digging to figure out how that was even possible (overwriting an existing object from within the C API), but I cannot for the life of me understand why. ROOT has way too many gotchas for me to ever recommend it.

cozzyd 8y ago
Yeah it has a lot of state that's not very pythonic (and I almost always use it from c++ or cling) but it is very good for semiinteractive plotmaking that's not possible in something like matplotlib. A lot of ROOT's legacy from the 90's shows, but ROOT6 has made a lot of progress.