I rarely found the bottleneck of Matlabs inefficiency to be a major issue with my work, and found the speed to get analysis started and finished a great benefit

I rarely found the bottleneck of Matlabs inefficiency to be a major issue with my work, and found the speed to get analysis started and finished a great benefit. I've used a lot of more 'real' programming languages when the need has arisen, but for day to day quickly crunching numbers, matlab (or octave, now) has been indispensable. I'd love to have the time to develop a good basis for numerical analysis in python, but the learning curve is a hard sell for myself when I've got a tool I'm comfortable with.