Scientific Plotting?

[Nick Bower]

People at my current work use MatLab or IDL for chomping data through
data calculations and plotting the results in an environment that lets
you get GUI's up and going very quickly (among other things).  It's been
a goal of mine that one day I could show them that this could be done
with as little effort (with greater room for expansion) using Python.  
Plus I'd like to put a strong case forward to our physics department for
our up-and-coming new scientific programmers to learn something with a
broader scope like Python than the now used IDL and recently abandoned
Fortran-77.

But...What do people use for plotting?  After looking at the Python
Topic Guides, I've taken a quick look at the BLT and DISLIN pages, but
both of these amazingly lack any screen shots to demonstrate their
capabilities!!!

And lastly, can array operations (using NumPy) be done without for loops
as in IDL/MatLab?  eg Multiplying 2 arrays is easy in these two packages
because you don't need array subscripting and iteration.

Thanks muchly, Nick.