[Matplotlib-users] Declarative interface to matplotlib

[Ram Rachum]

Thanks Ryan, that's interesting.

On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 10:31 PM Ryan May <rmay31 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The MetPy project has worked on a declarative, matplotlib-based plotting
> interface:
>
>   https://unidata.github.io/MetPy/latest/examples/index.html#plotting
>   https://unidata.github.io/MetPy/latest/api/generated/metpy.plots.html
>   https://unidata.github.io/python-training/gallery/declarative_500_hpa/
>
> This focuses, though, on domain-specific applications in meteorology and
> atmospheric science, leveraging the traitlets library. The interface was
> also designed to facilitate transition away from a legacy, declarative-like
> plotting tool.
>
> Not claiming by any means we have the interface perfect. We spent a lot of
> time trying to come up with new names for Figure and Axes in this interface
> since we did not want to collide with matplotlib's own classes. Honestly,
> the basic interface is pretty trivial to create (at least using traitlets).
> The challenge is to handle state update and invalidation properly when
> trying to support interactive use cases (especially when all of the classes
> are thin wrappers around matplotlib state).
>
> Ryan
>
> On Sun, Aug 23, 2020 at 11:39 AM Ram Rachum <ram at rachum.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I'd like to ask you a general question, as someone who isn't very
>> experienced with matplotlib.
>>
>> I noticed that matplotlib is very imperative, in contrast to declarative.
>> For example, I wanted to show an `imshow` plot with a colorbar, so I needed
>> to first create the plot, then run `plt.colorbar()`, then show the plot. In
>> more complicated plots, you could be doing 10+ actions one after another to
>> create a plot.
>>
>> I would find a declarative interface to be much more elegant, i.e. one
>> call to create the plot and lots of keyword arguments, some of them nested,
>> to specify all the options. Of course, matplotlib being a very mature
>> project, the current interface must be maintained forever. But, do you know
>> of any such declarative interface to matplotlib? Either as part of the
>> library, or a separate library that uses matplotlib?
>>
>> If such a thing doesn't exist, what would you think about adding one?
>>
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ram.
>> _______________________________________________
>> Matplotlib-users mailing list
>> Matplotlib-users at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/matplotlib-users
>>
>
>
> --
> Ryan May
>
>
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