I don’t decide anything. It just seems confusing that Tom is mentioned in the first line and at the same time there seems to be a consensus you should not connect to Tom for Plots.jl curent state.
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The solution for this is simple: instead of pinging people on forums directly, users who need help should ask general questions, open issues on the project page, etc. Even for active single-contributor projects, addressing individuals directly is not the preferred method.
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FWIW the idea of having a gallery of beautiful plots that can be explored visually (like this one https://www.r-graph-gallery.com/) is a really good idea, and something we’ve agreed on doing several times in fact. It’s just a question of sitting down to do it, as developer time is a limited resource.
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I think one or two well-done figures / panels, done with perhaps two different plotting packages, that emphasizes some important property of Julia in an attractive fashion, could be a really nice thing to have on the homepage. We should maybe discuss this in an issue. One of the figures could be the benchmark Gadfly figure already on the homepage; the other could be a (beautiful Plots.jl+GR?) figure showing e.g. the growth in number of packages or a network of packages depending on StatsBase or whatnot. I think the current figure stating look-at-all-you-can-do-in-Gadfly is perhaps less useful.
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Does any other general purpose language show a bunch of example plots on their language website?
FWIW, I think almost everything should be removed from the julialang start page and the number of menu items significantly reduced. Compare e.g. https://www.rust-lang.org or https://golang.org/ with https://julialang.org/.
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you are not alone:
https://github.com/JuliaLang/julialang.github.com/issues/674
There’s always going to be an exception: 
I wouldn’t call Mathematica a general purpose programming language though.
Hah! Resorting to semantics
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First sentence issue again? “Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for numerical computing.”
Unfortunately, people often seem to forget that Julia can also be a great general purpose programming language, not just a technical/scientific/numeric niche language.
However, the website http://www.matlab.com, like the one for Mathematica, also shows graphics immediately.
One might say that (the beginning of) the Julia home page is rather boring compared to Wolfram’s and MathWork’s.
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I was very specific with writing general purpose language because clearly e.g. a DSL language for plotting will have plots on their website. For Julia, it is one category of packages out of a hundred others.
What?
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For what its worth, I think that showing nice visuals on the website is a great and cheap way to make a good impression.
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Julia is presented as programming language for numerical computing. That’s the first sentence on tha webpage
Yes, Julia is an excellent language for numerical computing. If you have a point, you might as well just state it.
I agree that showing visuals of features related to the language (e.g. the performance chart) is good. My point is more that the plotting itself should perhaps not be so much in focus because a) it is not something that the language itself provide, b) there are multiple plotting packages with different tradeoffs so picking one package is difficult. This is different from e.g. Mathematica or Matlab that roll their own plotting functionality.
The focus on Gadfly on the current homepage seems to be an artifact from a time where Gadfly was almost the only usable plotting package in the ecosystem.
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To interject the opinion of a new user when I first started fiddling with Julia over the summer I initially thought Gadfly was the end-all be-all of plotting in Julia and struggled with it before I discovered the Plots ecosystem. I agree it may be over-emphasized on the homepage.
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This thread is so wildly off-topic that it probably can’t even be split easily 
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I don’t think plots should be on the homepage for the Julia programming language
I actually agree with this point. I only thought it could be appropriate because of the Gadfly selection of plots (I find it misleading to have only one of many alternatives appear so prominently in the homepage), but maybe the way to go is removing the display and instead add some charts of Julia related information (number of downloads, number of packages, stars on GitHub etc).
As for the topic of this thread, I’m also in the process of using Plots (with GR) to create publication quality figures and it is true that there have been some hiccups, but the best solution is probably reporting all the issues in detail and then maybe writing a blog post with a set of instructions (or even create a set of PLOTS_DEFAULTS that are appropriate for publication, if such a thing makes sense in a “cross-journal” way).
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