For those interested in this sort of thing, Julia's Gadfly can also use D3 as a backend: https://github.com/dcjones/Gadfly.jl (although to be fair gadfly has more in common with ggplot than matplotlib)
Looks pretty cool. I'll have to give it a shot. Look forward to the other features being implemented, specifically scatter plots given that I do a lot of work with them.
BTW, this is John from B&&C.