Today I ran into an interesting runtime error using ``matplotlib.pyplot``. This is going to get a bit technical. So if that is not your cup of tea just scroll down to the cute cat pic that deserves upvotes :D 

So ``matplotlib.pyplot`` is commonly used in python to generate any type of plot: bar-charts, histograms, scatter-plots etc. For some applications you might only want to save the figure somewhere in a directory using ``.savefig()`` (and not actually show it using ``.show()``). The weird thing is that if you end your figure generation with ``.savefig()`` the figure is still there even if the program you create saves a new figure. Generally, this won't be a big problem if you have a couple of figures but you might run into memory problems if you have hundreds of them. So it is good practice to close figures and you can do this with ``.close()``. [Here](https://matplotlib.org/2.1.0/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.close.html) is the background info on ``.close``.  If you want to ``.show()`` and then ``.close()`` does that work? Well, ``.show()`` blocks ``.close()`` for some reason. So you need to unblock it using ``plt.show(block=False)`` and then you can ``.close()`` it.  Here is a [stack-exchange](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40395659/view-and-then-close-the-figure-automatically-in-matplotlib) answer with a bit more background.

And now it is time for my cute cat!

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![image.png](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/mathowl/5n5KSW6q-image.png)
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