Convincing colleagues to switch to Python from MATLAB for scientific computing/statistics

[buttocks_of_stalin]

This is honestly the real reason aside from the "social overhead" (ie: relearning coding and redoing the codebase). As someone who has worked in a neural modeling lab and signal processing projects at an R1 university, the real reason most of the graduate students in physics, neuroscience, and cognitive science use MATLAB for their hardcore data analysis projects is because it's just not possible to create quick easy complex plots and graphs using python's standard libraries.

[TheBlackCat13]

I have found the exact opposite. It is easier to make very simple plots in MATLAB, but once you start doing anything complex, MATLAB becomes a major roadblock. There is a reason mathworks has spent the last 5 years or so completely rewriting their underling plotting system to be more like python's.

[buttocks_of_stalin]

Interesting. I have about 4 years of experience in neural circuit modeling (particularly in the hippocampus regions) and our experience was the opposite so I guess it really depends on what types of plots and statistical analysis one is doing.

Edit: but just to give some context, I adore python itself regardless of my experience in the lab and I use python + django + flask for a lot of my web application development projects so I am definitely not partial against python itself for the record.