Wanted to move this discussion here – the existence of https://github.com/mcmcplotlib/mcmcplotlib was news to me, and looks somewhat unmaintained.
One suggestion that would solve the latest comment is to follow pandas's lead, and make matplotlib optional. Mostly that would mean being a little more careful with imports so that only pymc3.plots imports matplotlib.
The most disruptive bit would be that pm.plot_posterior and pm.plot_posterior_predictive_glm are in the top level namespace, but we may be able to cargo cult from pandas (https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/blob/master/pandas/init.py#L53).
We still not get the time to make a mcmcdash… But I would say the best option is to build a separate package (shinystan alike) and slowly discontinued the ploting function PyMC3.
Yes, I spun out mcmcplotlib after a request from PyStan but it seems like they lost interest and now it’s just sitting there. The right thing to do would probably be to delete that stale repo to avoid further confusion.
I like your idea @colcarroll of making matplotlib optional.
Hi, Stan3 is going to come out so atleast I will wait that before starting to do anything big with mcmcplotlib.
I like the idea of mcmcdash.
ohh poor matplotlib, nobody likes you anymore 
Anyway, let me know if I can help with this 
I know right, I just (kind of) starting to know how to Google the right keywords.