I’ve been using matplotlib for nearly 5 years at least once a week.
I’m still learning things that exist within the pylab interface… not the most ideal UX.
For instance, I just learned about plt.axvline, which I could use
to draw vertical lines in my code instead of what I usually use, plt.vlines(coordinate_list, *plt.gca().get_ylim()),
but it’s not as general as plt.vlines since it actually plots a rectangle.
Still, though, for most of what I do (which is a single vertical line for drawing specific axes/time breaks in a plot) it’s easier.
The fact that there’s also no abline still gets to me, too, when I step back from it.
I wonder if you could make it “better” by making a better API that focuses on the UX,
adding a bit more semanic structure/nesting to the pyplot api that users could understand.
CLI UX is really hard, especially for cases where you can’t pipe, but you can nest.