# ListLogPlot fails if Dynamic Updating not enabled - Ticks specification?

MMA 11.0.1.0 Win 10 64 bit; MWE

ListLogPlot[Exp[Range[10]]]


With Dynamic Updating Enabled, result is correct. Without it MMA complains "Tick specification must be a list or a function" and the result is this

If Dynamic Updating is then enabled, or the graphic is saved to disk, the plot appears correctly.

ListPlot in place of ListLogPlot does not show this behaviour.

Smells like a bug - or is there a sound reason for this behaviour?

[It was doubly - or squared? - unfortunate that I hit this on my first use of ListLogPlot when I was also using custom ticks for the first time; I did not question the basic function for rather a long time]

• Somethings does indeed seem broken here - consider also ListPlot[Exp[Range[10]], ScalingFunctions -> "Log"], which doesn't generate an error, but simply shows wrong ticks. Also, this seems related – Lukas Lang Nov 18 '18 at 13:35
• It happens because it is the FrontEnd which generates base ticks but it can't rescale them/their positions so they are sent to Kernel and back etc. This communication is not possible when dynamic updating is disabled. Either the design is completely wrong or there is a bug in implementation which should not use the preemptive link for this exchange. – Kuba Nov 18 '18 at 15:38
• @Kuba Thanks for confirming that there is some kind of problem; some recent Windows update (probably) leaves the front end unresponsive for ~5s at a time, in some way related to graphics I think, so I disabled Dynamic Updating, which seemed to improve things - but this was an unexpected side effect. Curious about how you knew the cause; should you wish to make your comment into an answer I'll accept - my thanks either way. – Julian Moore Nov 20 '18 at 7:55