[adolgert]

There's a sharp divide between what's prepackaged for typical uses and attempts to customize visualization for any of three-dimensionality, parallel processing, or interactivity with large data. The latter set of tools use the Visualization Toolkit, or Paraview, MayaVI, and VisIt, all of which sit on top of VTK. Or there are commercial applications, such as EnVision and IDL. Keep a language-agnostic stable of prepackaged visualization techniques in Python, R, Matlab, Mathematica, Excel (yes, even), Julia, and Javascript. Then reach for the big hammers when absolutely necessary.