Its fairly often that I use get_xticklabels and other similar methods when exploring and visualizing data with matplotlib. I almost always use list(ax.get_xticklabels()) or ax.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 of silent_list is to silence the repr, but perhaps this can change. get_xticks returns an array. get_lines and get_labels return a silent list.

Is the silent list even necessary?