It provides an object-oriented API for embedding plots into applications using general-purpose GUI toolkits like Tkinter, wxPython, Qt, or GTK.

There is also a procedural "pylab" interface based on a state machine (like OpenGL), designed to closely resemble that of MATLAB, though its use is discouraged.

Michael Droettboom was nominated as matplotlib's lead developer shortly before John Hunter's death in August 2012[6] and was further joined by Thomas Caswell.

[10] Matplotlib is designed to be as usable as MATLAB, with the ability to use Python, and the advantage of being free and open-source.

In other words, one defines a function that takes a frame number as input and defines/updates the matplotlib-figure based on it.