disclaimer I work for enthought I did my whole phd in matlab. EPD is much cheaper and is free for academics even if it weren't free, I would use it anyways.

disclaimer I work for enthought I did my whole phd in matlab. EPD is much cheaper and is free for academics even if it weren't free, I would use it anyways. but it really isn't why is EPD better than matlab, it's why python is better than matlab. matlab is a domain specific application with a domain specific language. It doesn't work well with things outside of its domain. python is a general purpose language (And as such, has good general purpose constructs) but it happens to have excellent scientific and mathematical libraries. This is useful when you actually have to apply your research and build an application. numpy is also better for large data, because slicing arrays does not create copies of them (you can make it do so if you want to, but it doesn't by default) in matlab, slicing large arrays can cause you to run out of memory. Cython makes it really easy to start out with python, and then optimize your code down into C. with python you can run your calculations over a massive compute grid. Use messaging libraries like PyZMQ to distribute your data and result, and build real time GUIs to consume the final results. - a matlab cluster is quite expensive - chacko - another enthought python library which is free and open source is great for real time datavisualization, matlab does not have anything equivalent. - python has a large number of messaging libraries, with matlab I think you're stuck with MPI. Matlab always made me feel limited. I would work on a problem, and then reach a point where Matlab could not do what I needed to do. That rarely happens to me with python.