I am intimately familiar with ROOT, the most giant steaming pile if s**t I have ever had to work with. It has a C++ "interpreter", which is an incredibly bad idea: it combines all the worst things about an interpreted language with all of the worst things about a compiled language. Add to that the massive, vague APIs, trainwreck of globals and memory leaks, and you're guaranteed pain if you try to put together anything significant with it. There is a code generator 'rootcint' that will make your life absolutely miserable if you try to write any C++ more modern than, say, 1997 (ie use the STL in standard ways). And this scientific linux stuff needs to die. It's just a version of redhat that is in even worse repair than redhat is. ROOT does make histograms the way HEPers want their histograms... the only good thing you can say here is that there are python bindings that will allow you to hand off data from numpy easily. See python + scipy + matplotlib, below.

root is the most giant steaming pile if s**t I have ever had to work with. It has a C++ "interpreter", which is an incredibly bad idea: it combines all the worst things about an interpreted language with all of the worst things about a compiled language. Add to that the massive, vague APIs, trainwreck of globals and memory leaks, and you're guaranteed pain if you try to put together anything significant with it. And this scientific linux stuff needs to die. It's just a version of redhat that is in even worse repair than redhat is.