Ok, I was so rattled when I wrote the previous message that I forgot
to ask my actual question:
I was trying to change backends midstream because I was only getting
b/w plots when I used pcolor--I couldn't change the colormap. At
first I thought that this was because I was using the Postscript
backend and for some reason it assumed I wanted b/w output for
printing. After fooling around with some of the other imaging
backends, I used one of the interactive ones (this is a pain b/c I'm
running Python remotely and I'm sitting at the end of a slow internet
link. Therefore interactive windows take forever to pop up. More on
this later), and the plot was still b/w.
After significant frustration, I realized that my problem was that I
was specifying the color map as 'cm=' instead of 'cmap='; a reasonable
guess since the rest of the line is 'cm.hot' The problem was that
matplotlib silently ignored my misspecified argument.
This is gripe #1: weak typing only works when using undefined
variables bites you on the nose. Otherwise we're back to the bad old
days of fortran, when misspelling a variable name silently defined a
new variable. It would be nice if somewhere in the heirarchy of
function calls within matplotlib someone checked to make sure there
were no lonely, unused keyword arguments sloshing around. I realize
that this is hard to do robustly and with any generality, but there's
a lot at stake. Python would be unusable if use-before-definition
didn't generate an exception.
Gripe #2 is that it would be nice if the same word were abbreviated
the same way everywhere. Ie, either cmap or cm, not both.
Gripe #3 is related to interactive windows when Python and the X11
server are connected by a slow link. All of the interactive backends
I've used for matplotlib look great, but render very slowly in this
situation b/c they're sending all the pixel data. Since most plots
consist of a few lines, a bit of text, and a few dots, it'd be nice if
the windows rendered quickly over slow connections. For example,
Gnuplot runs very well in this configuration. I realize that this
doesn't invovle matplotlib per se, I just wanted to throw it out there
as a concern.
I apologize for the negative tone of this mail. Don't get me wrong--I
use matplotlib and I like it b/c it's the best thing I've found.
However, I just had one of those "GAAARGHGGHHHH!" moments and it's
taking a little while to de-stress.
Cheers,
Greg