[jotaf]

Good job, this looks extremely expressive and with fewer corner cases ("dark knowledge") than MPL/SNS, and unlike Altair/Plotly doesn't require a whole browser to display the output!

Still, I'd like to ask if you considered alternatives to MPL for the back-end. It's a venerable but ancient project with years of accumulated technical debt, and I'm sure you had to deal with lots of inconsistencies there.

For example, PyQtGraph is an alternative with a clear class hierarchy and can handle large-scale datasets without slowing down (while anything non-trivial in MPL has you wait seconds to render).

(I'd love to hear more suggestions that don't require a JS engine and don't build on MPL.)

[TedPetrou]

Thanks! I'm focused on building the user-facing API, as this is where I believe I'm best suited to make improvements due to my experience teaching and writing.

I'm definitely open to looking at alternative backends in the future and will check out PyQtGraph, but am sticking to matplotlib for now.