For approximately 16 years I have been using Matlab faithfully.  Back when I started (1993) all it had were 2D matrices and I remember having to use a package someone wrote up to have 3D volume capabilities (which are typically required for processing MRI datasets).  Matlab is great, don’t get me wrong.  There are few things that I don’t like about it.

So, sitting at a conference in Hawaii (tough life, I know) I had some ideas that I wanted to try out and quickly figured out that I could not get to the site license hosts back at my university.  Argh.  So, I started looking around to see if there were other options which would provide me a similar feel and processing capabilities.  There were a few options, but the one that stuck out was to use Python, Scipy and Numpy.  They were almost tailor made for what I wanted.

So, over the last little while I have been using the Python, Scipy, Numpy triad for most of my research and am feeling like I want to shift over completely the triad rather than using Matlab.