My use case is scientific computing and for that Python is excellent thanks to Numpy, IPython and Numba. It's often possible to write code that is nearly as fas

My use case is scientific computing and for that Python is excellent thanks to Numpy, IPython and Numba. It's often possible to write code that is nearly as fast as C, but it's far easier to write and debug, since you can just inspect and run code snippets in the shell. In that regard, it's similar to MATLAB, but it's FOSS and faster with the right libraries.