[yt-dev] Why does ProjectionPlot not take and pass **kwargs

[Nathan Goldbaum]

On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 3:37 PM, Yi-Hao Chen <yihaochentw at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 3:04 PM, Nathan Goldbaum <nathan12343 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 2:55 PM, Yi-Hao Chen <yihaochentw at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> I am wondering why ProjectionPlot (and others) do not take all the
>>> keyword arguments and pass them to PWViewerMPL and PlotWindow. For example,
>>> currently there is no way to set buff_size at the creation of a plot. One
>>> has to call .set_buff_size after the plot was created.
>>>
>>> I am thinking about leaving only the arguments specific to
>>> ProjectionPlot explicitly, and use **kwargs to pass all other arguments to
>>> PlotWindow. But if there are reasons not to do this, please let me know.
>>>
>>
>> This is on purpose, to reduce the API complexity. ProjectionPlot already
>> has a huge number of keyword arguments, adding more will only make it
>> harder to discover functionality.
>>
>
> I see. That make sense.
>
>>
>> I'd be much more interested in figuring out ways to make the setters more
>> intuitive - possibly by exposing plot attributes as descriptors?
>>
>
> I have no idea how to implement the descriptors...
>

Here's a nice article on descriptors that I've often referred to in the
past:

http://nbviewer.jupyter.org/urls/gist.github.com/ChrisBeaumont/5758381/raw/descriptor_writeup.ipynb

The idea would be to expose the internal state for the plot objects via
descriptors. This would make it possible to do, e.g.:

    plot = yt.ProjectionPlot(ds, 2, 'density')

    # both of these should work and be handled by the descriptor
    plot.buff_size = (800, 1600)
    plot.buff_size = np.array(800, 1600)

    print(plot.buff_size)
    plot.save()

There are a number of plot attributes (some of them currently private) that
we could handle (hopefully) more intuitively using this sort of API. The
reason why I think it needs to happen (if it should happen) as part of a
bigger refactoring is that we shouldn't leave the API partially converted
to look like this, as that will be even more awkward to use.

>
>>
>>>
>>> Thanks!
>>> Yi-Hao
>>>
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>>>
>>
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