The thing about Matlab is that it is very easy to work with, and so many things that are actually very tricky just work, things that you probably have never any

The thing about Matlab is that it is very easy to work with, and so many things that are actually very tricky just work, things that you probably have never any idea could fail in a particular way. They also probably picked a lot of habits from experience that you have no idea about, and also have specific tools and workflows they use. The matlab documentation is just extremely good. You can actually get useful and working _examples_ of code just from searching a command name in the help browser. Python documentation, I have found out, except the scientific stack which is actually pretty good, is lacking. You have a lot of text, and few examples, which are often not the examples you want. Python documentation is also often completely oblivious of the environment where you're using it, especially on windows. So you want to replace matlab, the first thing you have to do is understand the environment and context of what you users want to do, and discover if you can make it "just work". Like, soem things where in matlab would be a matter of just typing `load` and the name of the file and you magically get a variable with data in the way you already expect, where in python you have to hunt for some package or something specific. Ask them to demo what they are working on, and see if you can reproduce that in python. Then you start teaching them "programming".