I know exactly what you are talking about. When I first started my coursework in Machine Learning, I was given the freedom to use any programming language. Bu

I know exactly what you are talking about. When I first started my coursework in Machine Learning, I was given the freedom to use any programming language. But I simply defaulted to MatLAB because the rest of the CS department used it. I would have loved to do all my work in Python--and infact I tried to with NumPy and SciPy-- but it was just too hard to resist the comfortable environment MatLAB creates. So now I'm stuck porting over all my old code, which to be quite honest, is a good exercise in itself.