Imagine that you're not a complete beginner, but you're relatively new to programming. Furthermore, imagine that you'd like to be in a position for academic/lab or industry work.
Here's the question: supposing the above, if you had to decide between allocating your time and energy to learning either Python or MATLAB, what would you choose and why?
Thanks in advance! I'm facing this dilemma, and I need to make a decision.
Python. Python has interfaces to Matlab capabilities through the matplotlib family of modules, which are generally a version behind the current release of Matlab. Along with numpy, scipy, matplotlib and many other modules the scientific and visualization capabilities of python are comparable or exceed Matlab.
As for industry, Python is much more utilized in commercial applications and interconnects well with other software frameworks and technologies such as web (Django), databases (DB-API), Distributed Task Automation (Celery), configuration (JSON/XML), image manipulation (PIL), computational collaboration (ipython notebook) and many, many others. I haven't seen any commercial applications using Matlab, not to say they don't exist, but they aren't as utilized and tested as python.
Python is has become very popular the past 5 years or so in the atmospheric sciences, and the physical sciences as well.
http://matplotlib.org/
Daniel, each language has its pros and cons. Thus, it depends.
MATLAB is popular among engineers, as some highly sophisticated add-on packages exist (e.g. FEM). It is usually fairly expensive outside an academic (student) environment. When I used it for some of my PhD work, I found it slow, but this may have been my own inexperience or the add-on I was using.
Python is great for learning how to program, but also powerful enough to be considered the second standard language used by data scientists (besides R). It has a large following among the big data crowd, makers and also in a web context. I can also highly recommend the very active Berlin Python User Group (PUB; Greetings to Diez, Veit and Dinu).
How about picking a (small) relevant example problem and solve it in both languages? It should give you a fairly good idea, what to expect.
Python. Python has interfaces to Matlab capabilities through the matplotlib family of modules, which are generally a version behind the current release of Matlab. Along with numpy, scipy, matplotlib and many other modules the scientific and visualization capabilities of python are comparable or exceed Matlab.
As for industry, Python is much more utilized in commercial applications and interconnects well with other software frameworks and technologies such as web (Django), databases (DB-API), Distributed Task Automation (Celery), configuration (JSON/XML), image manipulation (PIL), computational collaboration (ipython notebook) and many, many others. I haven't seen any commercial applications using Matlab, not to say they don't exist, but they aren't as utilized and tested as python.
Python is has become very popular the past 5 years or so in the atmospheric sciences, and the physical sciences as well.
http://matplotlib.org/
While both offer similar results and computing capabilities (despite small syntax nuisances), Python is quickly overtaking Matlab in its capabilities and popularity of use. Python is free and open access allowing for very interesting, niche style modules that are continuing to be developed for a realm of scientific fields. In an era of increasing open access and replicability, it seems the Python is the way to go given the widespread availability of its packages and software. There are also modules such as Cython, which can be used to increase Python code efficiency to take advantage of C++ speed and libraries. Python is quick and easy to learn and has a wonderful community for solving problems.
http://cython.org/
Generally, It depends on the problem you are working on.
Otherwise, I will recommend Python for many reasons but I will tell you two main points which I think really important.
First it is open source, which means you can see, modify and use the source code as you wish.
The second point, Python includes the main aspects of Object Oriented programming which are not available in Matlab such as classes. That will help you to learn and use advanced programming techniques which are available in more advanced languages like C++. Also learning these techniques will help you to learn other languages like Java and C++ later if you wish or you can even learn Matlab much faster.
It worth-mentioning here that there is an Open source alternative for Matlab called Octave. It uses almost the same syntax but I still recommend Python over it.
https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/
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