One thing that always bothers me with both matplotlib and gnuplot, is that they literally seem to have a command (or function call) for everything. To set the t

One thing that always bothers me with both matplotlib and gnuplot, is that they literally seem to have a command (or function call) for everything. To set the tick size for the third-level ticks on the Y axis, you call set_third_level_y_ticks() or something like that. This is not necessarily bad (and maybe it has to be this way — I haven’t even tried to analyse the problem) but it feels very un-orthogonal, like everything is special-cased.