[danso]

It's been a long time since I've used Matlab (it was for a diff eq class), but isn't R, with vectors as its primary datatype, much more similar to Matlab than Scipy? Not that Scipy or Pandas is bad, but they have to work quite hard around the fundamentals of Python's syntax to emulate the same behavior of R/MATLAB.

[mmierz]

I don't think this is the case. Most of numpy, which powers the vectorized operations that the rest of the scientific stack uses, is written in C anyway. The python part is simple, just python bindings to the C functions.

The matlab-like syntax for getting slices of arrays is the only really non-pythonic thing I can think of.