What alternatives are there to pylab for plotting in Python? In particular, I'm looking for something that doesn't use the stateful model that pylab does.

Plotly lets you make graphs using a Python API, matplotlib, and pandas. Their IPython gallery has some example scientific graphs with the Python scripts that generated them.

Here's a sample:

Some recent exciting open source offerings:

• ggplot is based on R's ggplot2, with aesthetically pleasing defaults and a really concise api. wants to be a matplotlib killer

• bokeh makes interactive (html canvas) plots. emphasis on interativity + handling big data

• vega translates JSON "plot descriptions" into SVG or Canvas-based interactive plots, and vincent is a declarative interface for generating the JSON specifications.

_{(source: fastly.net)}