[kpgiskpg]

Getting the job done is the main point, of course, but I think a visualisation library should also handle common cases gracefully and have defaults that don't make me want to gouge my eyes out.

Every time I use matplotlib, I have to look up how to remove the border on my graph, make things slightly transparent, etc. The default colour palette isn't colourblind friendly, so the other day I spent half an hour trying to set up a more accessible one. I had to create / fetch 3 objects, their names being something like ScalarMap, Normalize and cmap. Why do I need to understand the relationship between these 3 objects when all I want to do is switch from one palette to another?

Meanwhile, it's so flexible as to be annoying for a non-expert. I often encounter matplotlib answers on StackOverflow about things that I would expect to "just work", but that actually require 20 lines of code to solve, written by someone who appears to be deeply familiar with the internals of the library.

Note: I'm not saying that a declarative approach solves these things.