 <p>Julia has its own interface to matplotlib called <code>PyPlot</code>. (you didn't <em>really</em> expect you'd simply type <code>@pyimport</code> and then just write python code into julia and magically have it all work, did you? :D )</p> <p>See <a href="https://gist.github.com/gizmaa/7214002" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a> for examples on how to use <code>PyPlot</code>; The <a href="https://gist.github.com/gizmaa/7214002#histogram" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><code>hist</code></a> plot in particular needs some special syntax to differentiate it from the julia native <code>hist</code> function (<a href="https://github.com/gizmaa/Julia_Examples/blob/master/pyplot_histogram.jl" rel="nofollow noreferrer">check the code for its example</a>).</p> <p>Here is your code translated to PyPlot to the best of my ability (works in Julia v0.6.0)</p> <pre><code>import PyPlot a = vec( rand( 1:1000, 400, 300 )) b = vec( rand( 200:700, 400, 300 )) c = vec( rand( 300:1200, 400, 300 )) common_params = Dict( :bins =&gt; 20, :range =&gt; (-100, 1300), :normed =&gt; true ) PyPlot.subplots_adjust( hspace=.4 ) PyPlot.subplot( 311 ) PyPlot.title( "Default" ) PyPlot.plt[:hist]( a; common_params... ) PyPlot.plt[:hist]( b; common_params... ) PyPlot.plt[:hist]( c; common_params... ) PyPlot.subplot( 312 ) PyPlot.title( "Skinny shift - 3 at a time" ) PyPlot.plt[:hist]( (a, b, c); common_params... ) PyPlot.subplot( 313 ) common_params[:histtype] = "step" PyPlot.title( "With steps" ) PyPlot.plt[:hist]( a; common_params... ) PyPlot.plt[:hist]( b; common_params... ) PyPlot.plt[:hist]( c; common_params... ) PyPlot.savefig( "3hist.png" ) PyPlot.show() # PS, this is unnecessary in PyPlot. All commands show instantly </code></pre> <p>I'm not sure why you chose a range of (-5,5); this was causing a problem on the third subplot. I've changed it to something more reasonable here just to show you this works.</p> <p>Here's the result below:</p> <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/x3q3T.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/x3q3T.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>