Re: [matplotlib-devel] matplotlib Hangout today at 14:00 UTC (10:00am ET)

[Chris B. <chr...@no...>]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 6:34 AM, Benjamin Root <ben...@ou...> wrote:

> It doesn't feel weird. It feels generalized.
>

or both ;-)

It is the same way to add any number of plots, regardless if it is just
> one, or twenty. If you don't want to do it that way, you can just simply do:
>
> fig = plt.figure()
> ax = fig.gca()  # "get current axes" automatically creates an axes if one
>

rally ugly -- the whole point here is to get away from the concept of a
"current" anything -- I'm actually surprised that that's a figure method at
all...

 It does:

http://matplotlib.org/api/figure_api.html#matplotlib.figure.Figure.add_subplot
> This is *the* function that does axes creation for a figure, whether it is
> one, or many.
>


> subplots() is a recent addition.
>

And a nice one -- I've been wanting that for years! (and I
first discovered it in your tutorial, Ben!) The trick has always been that
plot() actually creates (If not re-using) three objects you might want to
work with: figure, axes, and line objects, so an oo interface that lets you
do that with one call is tricky -- I think this is a nice compromise.

We are in the process of updating our documentation. But add_subplot() is
> not going away because it works just fine, and it is very familiar to users
> of Matlab and Octave.
>

I've lost track a bit if there is support for a new OO-only API
(namespace), in which case, maybe some of this could be cleaned up as well.

I'd kind of like to see a fig.subplots() that has the same API as
plt.subplots(), for symmetry's sake, and because add_subplot() has a kind
of crufty API. Except it wouldn't return the figure instance (though it
could).

-Chris













>
>
>> In principle I think the current API violates the "There should be one--
>> and preferably only one --obvious way to do it" rule here, and elsewhere
>> :-)
>>
>>
> I feel the way forward should be to create a cleaner API and map the
>> current one through a compatibility layer to that.
>>
>>
> This has already been done. We have the GridSpec API that everything else
> maps to, for compatibility. But most people still like add_subplot() and
> subplots() for some odd reason... I think the primary issue is one of
> documentation, and we are currently in the process of upgrading that. We
> always welcome contributions to that effort!
>
> Cheers!
> Ben Root
>
>
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Chr...@no...