I'm a huge fan of Python and I use it for everything (to put it mildly, I've spent weeks translating MATLAB code from other researchers into Python simply becau

I'm a huge fan of Python and I use it for everything (to put it mildly, I've spent weeks translating MATLAB code from other researchers into Python simply because I believe Python is far nicer to work with), but I must say that in my experience SciPy's numerical libraries are still fairly inferior to MATLAB's own (it may have to do with the $2000 price-tag). Even simple numerical root-finding and integration of one-dimensional PDEs is nowhere near the caliber of MATLAB's. Perhaps the most time-consuming thing I've found is that, to get NumPy/SciPy to work for some scenarios, you can spend your time tinkering around with a bunch of different parameters whereas the same functions work directly out-of-the-box on MATLAB. Rarely have I found the opposite to be the case, and I know this is the reason a few researchers I work with still don't use Python for their internal work. Perhaps I can cook up a few examples from my projects, just to make a fair comparison.