Speaking as a grad student in astronomy, I tried using MATLAB for a little while but it occupied an awkward middle ground for me. It was a bit too high-level f

Speaking as a grad student in astronomy, I tried using MATLAB for a little while but it occupied an awkward middle ground for me. It was a bit too high-level for the lower-level things that python is useful for (e.g. grabbing images off of a survey's servers or writing a script to align a spectroscopic mask), but it was a bit too low-level to compete with the things Mathematica is good at (e.g. symbolic integration, carrying units through equations). One major advantage python has over MATLAB that the author mentioned but didn't really emphasize is that python packages exist to interface with IRAF. Pretty much every astronomer who has to touch data uses IRAF to reduce the data and I can tell you from personal experience that IRAF is a horrible piece of software to work with directly. The python interface makes it much more tolerable, but I don't think there exists a comparable MATLAB version. Without a MATLAB interface to IRAF, python beats MATLAB for astronomical purposes hands down.