Gnuplot 4.0 Released
RazorBlack writes "Almost a year and a half after Gnuplot's previous stable release (3.7.3), version 4.0 has arrived! It boasts quite a lot of very interesting new features, including interactive mouse control, coloured 2D maps and 3D surfaces, interpolation and more flexible data files. Science geeks rejoice!"
Please note that despite it's name, gnuplot has nothing to do with the FSF and the GNU project. It's not even released under the GPL. In fact it's not even Free Software, since it's license doesn't allow distribution of a modified version of the program.
You can read this in the gnuplot FAQ
It's the primitive part I like about gnuplot. It's great for quick and dirty data verification plots. When I want really pretty plots for publications, I use GMT. It take forever to fine tune a GMT plot, but you can make them exactly how you want. It's also very scriptable(TM) which one of my requirements.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
For fancier stuff there are fancier tools (including opendx ), but for simple stuff gnuplot works well, is reasonably priced and is hard to beat.