pylab

pylab is a historic interface and its use is strongly discouraged. The equivalent replacement is matplotlib.pyplot. See Matplotlib Application Interfaces (APIs) for a full overview of Matplotlib interfaces.

pylab was designed to support a MATLAB-like way of working with all plotting related functions directly available in the global namespace. This was achieved through a wildcard import (from pylab import *).

Warning

The use of pylab is discouraged for the following reasons:

from pylab import * imports all the functions from matplotlib.pyplot, numpy, numpy.fft, numpy.linalg, and numpy.random, and some additional functions into the global namespace.

Such a pattern is considered bad practice in modern python, as it clutters the global namespace. Even more severely, in the case of pylab, this will overwrite some builtin functions (e.g. the builtin sum will be replaced by numpy.sum), which can lead to unexpected behavior.