What language - platform use to data acquisiton/numerical work?

[Matteo]

I'm a programmer, I've worked with C, Java, Perl, Matlab, PHP, and a
bit of almost every widespread language. I love OO programming. I have
recently doscovered Python thanks to the great enthusuasm of its
supporters. I love Java for its elegance and OO-ness, and Perl for its
raw power. I don't like C++ for its long developng time and complexity
and hate Visual C++ for being the worst (most complex, most slow, most
... ugly) develop environment on the earth.

I have to do (from scratch and alone) a work without any language
restriction. The system will have to work under MSWin2000 and maybe
that, for stability, we will port it to unix-likes.

The work involve:
- a system of data acquisition (and control) from (of) a PLC via
serial port. The data acquisition is in real time with low frequency
(about 1 - 2 hz)
- a big system of data analisys, pattern recognition, data
visualization and heavy user interaction mostly for experiment with
algorithms and for diagnostics
- a end user system, mostly a wrapping of siplified GUI to the
previous two subsystems.

I think Python would be suitable for my work. What do you think?

I think I will handle serial port comm vith small C libraries, I don't
know if Python is suited to the problem.
Having the base drivers should not be a problem ro realize the data
acquisition system in Python Or not?

The data analisys numerical procedures have to be done in matlab due
to their complexity and specialization, and I fear even the plotting
will have to be done in Matlab. I have seen there are some bridges
from Phyton to Matlab, how they are?
My problem here is where to start developing in Pyyhon and where to
stop in ML. ML has a very simple and good sistem of building GUIs, how
is Pithon?

Finallly I hope to develop the wrapping GUI layer in Phyton. Again,
has Python some simple and good GUI support? I've seen that the most
widely used GUI module is something in tcl/tk (which I don't know at
all). Considering that I don't know python nor tcl/tk, how is the
learnig and developing curve?

Thank you all.

Matteo Della Torre