could you give an example of an "non-trivial" thing you're talking about (i.e a few lines of code)? And how you solve it with "Bokeh"? I agree that matplotlib's functional interface is somewhat messy, but that is somewhat historical, and stems from wanting to mimic how matlab works. I personally find matplotlib's OO interface both very powerful, and somewhat intuitive, once one gets a hang of it, hence I'm curious of specific cases where it fails for you.