Axes

matplotlib has a reputation for being clunky, and the reputation is earned exactly by people fighting the wrong api. there are two: a stateful pyplot layer that mimics matlab (“draw on whatever was touched last”), and an object-oriented core in which every visible thing is an object you hold a reference to. the second is the real library; the first is sugar for one-liners. write fig, ax = plt.subplots() and stay in object land, and most of the clunk evaporates. 𐃏 all code on this page executed for real; figures were written to /tmp and are described rather than embedded, with true file sizes.