> is an illustration of my point: the language itself isn't powerful enough to do the job so you rely on a lot of libraries written in different languages to glue it all together.

The language is 100% capable. Matplotlib's API is horrible and confusing because one of their design goals was/is to be similar to matlab (that's where the "mat" in it's name comes from) to allow people who are comfortable with matlab to switch more easily.

Matlab's plotting facilities are a mess of global state, so matplotlib has copied it.

> An 'elegant' language would provide a way to do so without all of these leaky abstractions.

It would have to do something else, first: Exist.

In 10+ years of programming, I've yet to ever see a implementation of a complex abstraction that was comprehensive and complete enough that I didn't find a corner case requiring me to reach through it and deal with platform specific something-or-other.

You are right, you can't separate the language and the libraries, and a language would profit if it had a way to express these abstractions better. But if you'd that kind of syntax the Python language I think it would become bloated.

I think I like Python, because coming from C, a lot of things that are tedious there are effortless in Python (Strings! Lists and dicts, libraries, and so on.)

I came from C as well and even though Python does make strings, dicts and so on easier the main difference between the two (compiled vs interpreted) is exactly why you get all those libraries in the first place: it is super hard to get good performance out of an interpreted language if you want to crunch numbers.

That's why each and every number crunching problem will eventually make use of the various escape hatches to call libraries written in a language that is performant.

As for strings: BASIC also had strings. That doesn't mean that having strings (or even dicts) is what makes a language elegant.

The problem really is that there are only so many sweet spots for programming languages and usually those come with limitations with respect to the domain you want to use them for. Pick any two: expressive, fast, easy to use.