Ggplot2 is by far the best conceptually and syntactically. It makes you think in terms of visual mappings, which is an incredible framework for understanding data viz.
Seaborn is a decent equivalent on python, but it's more constrained by how python operates (which is a good and bad thing, R is a wild language)
jupyter notebook + python + matplotlib is what I think you're looking for.
I'm not looking for an environment (like, say, jupyter). Rather I'm writing something like maptplotlib, by wrapping something like maptplotlib in my own API
I don't know what that first line means, but I really like R studio for plots
updated. Any clearer now?
I don't think I can use R
Plotly is pretty much all you need. It can create static plots like matplotlib, but it also has dynamic plus in which you can interact with your data, zoom in, rotate, etc. It is my favorite and I haven't come across anything better.
A place to share and discuss data visualizations. #dataviz