Many, many labs are migrating their MATLAB code to Python these days. This is no accident. My last job (academic research) I was a full time MATLAB coder, and

Many, many labs are migrating their MATLAB code to Python these days. This is no accident. My last job (academic research) I was a full time MATLAB coder, and I can say that MATLAB has many problems of its own. It has a decent all in-one IDE/REPL that makes it easy to get started and do off the cuff work. It has very well optimized matrix operations, you can cook up some decent scripts and it has some nice toolboxes, but for anything larger it very quickly becomes a huge mess. Try maintaining and updating a 100k+ loc MATLAB script with others. Or writing a GUI. It's not pretty. MATLAB might not quite deserve the terrible reputation it has within the larger software community, but I would never go back, and can testify that there is a massive and rapid migration among the scientific community away from MATLAB into Python going on right now.