The real power of MATLAB comes from the toolboxes, not the language itself. Writing performance critical sections in C code (mex files in MATLAB) has improved

The real power of MATLAB comes from the toolboxes, not the language itself. Writing performance critical sections in C code (mex files in MATLAB) has improved speed dramatically in the cases I have tried (by an order of magnitude.) I have found that line by line porting of MATLAB code to Python is trivial if you don't use toolboxes, the most annoying part in the porting is 1 indexing. The biggest advatnage besides toolboxes is the IDE support of MATLAB. Ipython + emacs + matplotlib can emulate that, but still for most people, it is too much of a hassle.