I have some code that draws some plots and I notice it raises an AttributeError on the show() method of a figure object. I don't really know the details but I assume that IPython is somehow providing its own backend. Inspecting a figure object created with backend 'tk' or 'wx' I notice that show() doesn't seem to be a bound method but a function, pointing at the respective backend's implementation of show()?

It seems like figure objects should provide this in the context of notebook inline plotting, even if it's a no-op, for the sake of not breaking existing code.