The old API was meant to mimic MATLAB. It's in the name -- the "mat" in "matplotlib" refers to MATLAB. And yes, those of us who were brought up on MATLAB gravit

The old API was meant to mimic MATLAB. It's in the name -- the "mat" in "matplotlib" refers to MATLAB. And yes, those of us who were brought up on MATLAB gravitated toward it in the early days because it was so familiar. For better or worse, MATLAB was and still a popular in academia (less so these days, but still being used especially in control engineering). MATLAB's plotting is not the best, but it's familiar to MATLAB legacy folks, who made up many of the early folks who moved over to Numpy, Matplotlib, SciPy. It was a bridge.