On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 2:48 AM, Chris Beaumont <beaum...@hawaii.edu> wrote: > I don't fully agree with Eric that changing the defaults should be treated > as an API break -- yes, it may irritate a minority of users, but their code > will still run. I'd flip around your argument for the role of rcParams and > customization: the majority user is probably someone who doesn't know much > about rcParams, or all the ways plots can be customized. *That* is the use > case to optimize, not the "legacy" users invested in the current style.
As one small data point here, from a really excellent paper reviewing the trade-offs in colormap design and deriving the "cool-warm" colormap as a good default: "This diverging color map interpolation has also been added to ParaView, a free, open-source end-user scientific visualization application, and was first featured in the 3.4 release in October 2008. Although ParaView does let users change the color map and there is no way to track who does so, in our experience few users actually do this. In the nearly 3000 messages on the ParaView users’ mailing list from October 2008 to July 2009, there was no mention of the change of color map from rainbow to cool-warm diverging. Users seem to have accepted the change with little notice despite most users’ affinity for rainbow color maps." - http://www.cs.unm.edu/~kmorel/documents/ColorMaps/ColorMapsExpanded.pdf It absolutely should be easy to go back to the way things were, for reproduction of old carefully hand-tweaked plots etc. But, there are cases where our defaults are demonstrably terrible; and, these defaults are demonstrably the direct cause of people producing unnecessarily inferior plots; and, it's been many years now that this situation has continued out and nothing has happened because we don't want to be hasty. At some point we need to bite the bullet and make these things better. -n ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ See everything from the browser to the database with AppDynamics Get end-to-end visibility with application monitoring from AppDynamics Isolate bottlenecks and diagnose root cause in seconds. Start your free trial of AppDynamics Pro today! http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=48808831&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
