[patrec]

Matlab is much nicer to use than python for problems that fall well into its (much narrower) niche. It's super easy to bash some matrices together with nice syntax, plot the results and interactively and iteratively develop code. Profiling python kinda sucks, whereas in matlab the IDE will color code each line of code based on profile information. Reloading python code sucks, whereas in matlab you just change a function file and the modified definition becomes immediately available in your interactive session. Everything is much simpler and more immediate (and of course also more limiting, if you want to do some general purpose software engineering). It also used to be significantly more performant than python for many important tasks (and maybe still is).

Octave, on the other hand is IMO really only of interest if you somehow need some degree of compatibility with the Matlab ecosystem or want to teach non-programmers how to do some basic numerical linear algebra stuff. Otherwise, if you want something free, just stick with python.

[marmaduke]

Python has line_profiler which works quite well. It’s not part of the standard distribution but easy enough to install.

[patrec]

I've used both. I've also used ipython's autoreload functionality with various custom tweaks etc. In both cases the experience was much inferior.