Barchart (o plot) 3D in Python

For some time now, matplotlib had no 3D support, but it has been added back recently. You will need to use the svn version, since no release has been made since, and the documentation is a little sparse (see examples/mplot3d/demo.py). I don't know if mplot3d supports real 3D bar charts, but one of the demos looks a little like it could be extended to something like that.

Edit: The source code for the demo is in the examples but for some reason the result is not. I mean the test_polys function, and here's how it looks like:

example figure http://www.iki.fi/jks/tmp/poly3d.png

The test_bar2D function would be even better, but it's commented out in the demo as it causes an error with the current svn version. Might be some trivial problem, or something that's harder to fix.

MyavaVi2 can make 3D barcharts (scroll down a bit). Once you have MayaVi/VTK/ETS/etc. installed it all works beautifully, but it can be some work getting it all installed. Ubuntu has all of it packaged, but they're the only Linux distribution I know that does.

One more possibility is Gnuplot, which can draw some kind of pseudo 3D bar charts, and gnuplot.py allows interfacing to Gnuplot from Python. I have not tried it myself, though.