I think you'd be surprised at how powerful NumPy is. Try timing multiplying large matrices (I can tell you who wins, and not by a small margin) One downside is

I think you'd be surprised at how powerful NumPy is. Try timing multiplying large matrices (I can tell you who wins, and not by a small margin) One downside is you do have to poke around for the right functions, whereas in Matlab you have all the functions sitting in your (always global) namespace.