Do you REALLY need the colors?

Seaborn is a Python visualization library based on matplotlib. It provides a high-level interface for drawing attractive statistical graphics. Look at this example from the seaborn documentation site

>>> import seaborn as sns
>>> sns.set_style("whitegrid")
>>> tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")
>>> ax = sns.barplot(x="day", y="total_bill", data=tips)

This example shows the default barplot and is the first barplot. Can you see how easy it is to add colors to the different columns? But WHY? What do those colors represent? It looks like the only information that is encoded by the color is the bar category. We already have this information in the form of bar location. Having this colorful image adds nothing but a distraction. It is sad that this is the default behavior that seaborn developers decided to adopt.

Look at the same example, without the colors

>>> ax = sns.barplot(x="day", y="total_bill", color='gray', data=tips)

Isn’t it much better? The sad thing is that a better version requires memorizing additional arguments and more typing.

This was my because you can rant.