[cycomanic]

Funny I'm in optical comms as well, chances are we know each other. I never used "pwelch" though. But I concur my statement on documentation was too strong, I guess it depends quite a bit.

Regarding IDE, I guess we tend to put priorities on different things. I find pycharm's (pro edition) git Integration, debugging, refactoring and profiling vastly superior. I plot using regular qt windows and I agree that for interactive plots where one wants to look at points etc, matlab has the edge, for publication ready plots matplotlib beats matlab hands down though (although the API is quite verbose, proplotlib is a wrapper that makes things more convenient IMO).

Anyway I think we have different priorities in what we are looking for. We use Python for labautomation and the matlab instrumentation toolbox is a buggy mess, our measurement times decreased by a factor of 5-10 when we switched from matlab.

Regarding cost, we are a university so matlab and python have equal costs. I do know of colleagues at industry labs where matlab cost was a factor though.