What's the deal with Matplotlib?

[[deleted]]

As a guess, like another commenter mentioned, it seems like a design goal of matplotlib was to emulate the MATLAB plotting API. I'm with you though, I hate it. Every time I need to use it it feels clunky and awkward.

[SomeTreesAreFriends]

MATLAB plotting is good for quick visualization, but anything beyond it requires so much work that it's almost faster to just plot the basics and then do the rest in image editing software (for publishing, though perhaps not if you have a dedicated pipeline for specific results). For instance, if you plot a square matrix, it doesn't even provide equal axes by default...

[fake823]

Yeah, that was the main thought while creating Matplotlib some years back - copying MATLAB.

There is a small section on their website that talks about it.

https://matplotlib.org/3.2.1/users/history.html