> Python defeated Matlab. This is the answer. Scientific Python was originally an alternative to MATLAB. When I was in grad school, I did most of my research i

> Python defeated Matlab. This is the answer. Scientific Python was originally an alternative to MATLAB. When I was in grad school, I did most of my research in MATLAB. Then we had a visiting student who was doing very similar computations in SciPy, and he assured me performance was not a problem. I migrated my MATLAB scripts to Python and never looked back. It was only after being a viable alternative to MATLAB did people decide it can be used for much more than what you typically get with MATLAB.