[cafebeen]

I think you're both right, but you might be thinking of different tasks and libraries. If we're talking about solving a specific type of PDE, then in that scenario he's probably right that MATLAB will work better out of the box, but if we're talking about logistic regression on data from a messy CSV table, then python will work great and have better usability than MATLAB (IMO). He might also be thinking of versioning and packaging headaches in python, which are quite a pain the first time exposed to them coming from a walled garden environment.

[actinium226]

Actually, yes, he did mention packaging headaches as well. MATLAB manages to sidestep the issue by not having a package manager, and basically forcing you to include the literal source code of any non-mathworks dependencies in your repo.

We do need a better story with dependencies in Python, and I'm happy to see there have been several posts over the last week talking about this issue.

That said I think that for academic projects it can be fairly straightforward to handle after an initial learning curve. A lot of projects can be accomplished with just numpy/scipy/matplotlib and maybe a couple other specialty libraries.

[hgomersall]

MATLAB does not sidestep that issue. It kicks it back to the user to worry about. Dependencies in MATLAB are essentially non existent. It's up to you as the user the manage everything about them.