While reading “Natural Language Processing with Python” I ran into problems on my Mac with examples that were using the dispersion_plot function: calls to the function returned immediately without displaying anything.

Turns out matplotlib‘s back-end wasn’t configured properly. To fix this I had to add a rc file (matplotlibrc) to my ~/.matplotlib directory. The rc file contains the following:

And, hey presto:

(disclaimer: “Works on my machine!”)