About Scott

Hi, I’m Scott! I’m a neuroscientist with a passion for software development and I really enjoy contributing to and maintaining open-source projects. You can learn more about me from personal website: www.SWHarden.com/about

History of ScottPlot

I created ScottPlot to make it easier to get started creating scientific charts in C# applications. Like many scientists, I spent many years using matplotlib for Python. Matplotlib is a fantastic plotting library that is easy to learn, but it can be difficult package and distribute Python applications. Managing interpreter versions, setting up dev environments, and debugging dependency errors is beyond the scope of capabilities for most non-programmers who just want to run a program to analyze some data.

In 2017 I started relying less on Python and more on C# and the .NET stack for creating scientific desktop applications that are easy to package and deploy. I created my own simple plotting solution, and after a few years of incremental refinement and lots of input from the user community ScottPlot grew to have a life of its own!

What’s With the Name?

When I created ScottPlot I thought I would be its only user. It started as a single class for drawing points in Cartesian space on a bitmap. I made it open-source so that others could learn from it, but as time went by I was surprised to learn others were using it in their own applications. A few years later I decided to formally support it as an independent project and published it as a NuGet package in 2019. Since then ScottPlot has matured into a useful package thanks to thousands of new features and many contributions from the open-source community, but it retains its original silly name.