A bar chart, also known as a bar graph, is a visual representation where categorical data is displayed using rectangular bars. The height or length of these bars is directly proportional to the values they depict. Without further ado, let’s have a look at the bar chart implementation in matplotlib:

Required Parameters

In this example, we utilize the bar() function from pyplot to create a bar chart. We provide a list of programming language names for the x-axis as the first argument (x) and the respective bar heights representing popularity percentages as the second argument (height).

Optional Parameters

Using the color keyword argument, we speicfy the list of color names. By default, all bars will have a bluish color.

Another important optional parameter is width and stands for the width(s) of the bars, its default value is 0.8. It can either be a single float number, meaning equal width for each bar, or an array of floats, in which each element corresponds to the width of the respective bar. Let’s change this parameter for our example:

We can clearly see that the width decreases from left to right, that’s exactly what we expected.

As with other plots, you can always refer to the documentation for a quick lookup of the bar() function syntax and all of its parameters.