[justeleblanc]

> when a tool doesn't work well it's an opportunity to contribute

That's like trying to convince someone to buy a fairphone and telling them that if the phone is lacking in some area, they can contribute to the design. Maybe you believe in the message and you're willing to make sacrifice, But if you're a math postdoc whose immediate concern is getting a tenured job before time is up, you just use what's easy and works, because you've got other stuff on your plate that is much closer to your expertise (developing new mathematical knowledge).

[actinium226]

You're right, and honestly I was just trying to think of something to try to shift the narrative. There are other advantages to Python, personally I really value its expressiveness, the plethora of good tools (Jupyter, PyCharm, Spyder), and the massive amount of libraries in different domains (beyond all the scientific stuff there's Panda3D, pygame, Django), but I don't think these things are selling points to those in the MATLAB world. Having used MATLAB to a medium degree, I know that if you're just trying to get something done you can do it, so a more expressive language is not really a selling point. The extra tools and libraries might be a better talking point, but yea I was just trying to find some angle that I could leverage to make the guy curious about Python.