> is an illustration of my point: the language itself isn't powerful enough to do the job so you rely on a lot of libraries written in different languages to g

> is an illustration of my point: the language itself isn't powerful enough to do the job so you rely on a lot of libraries written in different languages to glue it all together. The language is 100% capable. Matplotlib's API is horrible and confusing because one of their design goals was/is to be similar to matlab (that's where the "mat" in it's name comes from) to allow people who are comfortable with matlab to switch more easily. Matlab's plotting facilities are a mess of global state, so matplotlib has copied it. > An 'elegant' language would provide a way to do so without all of these leaky abstractions. It would have to do something else, first: Exist. In 10+ years of programming, I've yet to ever see a implementation of a complex abstraction that was comprehensive and complete enough that I didn't find a corner case requiring me to reach through it and deal with platform specific something-or-other.