title: how to rotate xticks on one axis of figure in matplotlib without "getting" the labels as a list
body: <p>suppose i have the following code which creates one matplotlib figure with two axes, the second of which has x-axis labels as dates:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import pandas as pd
  import numpy as np
  import seaborn as sns
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  import datetime as dt    
  
  x1 = np.arange(0,30)
  x2 = pd.date_range('1/1/2016', periods=30, freq='D')
  y1 = np.random.randn(30)
  y2 = np.random.randn(30)
  
  %matplotlib inline
  fig, ax = plt.subplots(1,2, figsize=(18,5))
  ax[0].scatter(x1,y1)
  ax[1].scatter(x2,y2)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>displaying this in an ipython notebook will show the x axis labels of the graph on the right as running into one another. i would like to rotate the labels to improve visibility. all of the documentation and online searching seems to suggest one of the following 2 options (both after the last line above): </p>
  
  <p><strong>#1</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>plt.setp(ax[1].xaxis.get_majorticklabels(),rotation=90,horizontalalignment='right')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p><strong>or #2</strong></p>
  
  <pre><code>plt.xticks(rotation=90)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>either of these will work but will also print a list of labels (which for some reason is different in the first example than in the second)</p>
  
  <p>how do i accomplish the rotation/display without also outputting some array? </p>