Its fairly often that I useget_xticklabels and other similar methods when exploring and visualizing data with matplotlib. I almost always uselist(ax.get_xticklabels()) orax.get_xticklabels()[0] to view. When teaching, it's also much nicer to be able to see some of the labels without this workaround. One of the main purposes of the getter methods is to actually see a nice underlying representation of the object.

I see from the docstrings that the purpose ofsilent_list is to silence the repr, but perhaps this can change.get_xticks returns an array.get_lines andget_labels return a silent list.

Is the silent list even necessary?