I am not particularly sure that we want to support passing x and y as kwargs, see recent discussion on a similar topic at #11526.
(But if we decide we indeed don't, then we should make the documentation clear and error out when they are passed in as kwargs.)

Thank you for your reply!
A warning message and a clear documentation would definitely help.

Another suggestion would be a 'keyword-only' mode for the plot function (and other affected methods, today I stumbled upon the same issue with loglog): If x and/or y are passed as kwargs, no positional arguments are allowed. Maybe this could be implemented as a layer around the current plot function, but I am sure if this breaks compatibility.

@taxus13 for an immediate work-around that's not writing your own function, seaborn might have you covered:
http://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/relational.html#relational-tutorial

fwiw I'm also against fully kw-only mode (also as discussed in the linked thread).

I think that plt.errorbar(x=x, y=y) works is more accidental than anything.

Well, errorbar doesn't have a completely stupid weird signature...

I guess it is a bit weird that this just doesn't plot anything, rather than give some sort of error.

I agree it should error out.

If you are using a subplots, then you might want to consider the following -

''' The Figure in this case is 'fig' and
inside 'fig' is the subplot 'ax'. '''

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 6))

# Plot the data

ax.plot([1, 2, 3], [1, 2, 3])
plt.show()

I hope that helped!

Actually a duplicate of #4059.