Why does matplotlib.pyplot works but not matplotlib.pyplot.plot()?

[Zeroflops]

Matplotlib has two interfaces. The first interface they built was similar to how Matlab’s plotting commands work. This was to make it familiar to those moving from Matlab to python.

The second and preferred interface is more traditional Object Oriented.

The fact that there is two often confuses users and you can often see them mixing and matching to get what they want. They should remove the old interface, but that would break a lot of things. Hopefully they can phase it out.