If python is good enough to replace R or Matlab for you, then you are using a negligible fraction of what those platforms have to offer.
R is a lot like vim or javascript. It has a lot of warts, but it's an incredibly expressive toolkit for its task. I usually buy into a language once I find a few extremely gifted developers working with it (and who seem to do so voluntarily). For instance: for vim it's Tim Pope, for R, it's Hadley Wickham, for javascript it's Mike Bostock.
Python, despite its many good decisions, is likewise full of warts.
So, who are good developers to follow in the python/numpy community?
> who are good developers to follow in the python/numpy community?
Off the top of my head: Travis Oliphant, creator of numpy and founder of two companies in the scientific Python space; Jake Vanderplas, enthusiastic developer and blogger and Fernando Perez, creator of IPython (disclaimer: I work for Fernando). In the broader Python world, Kenneth Reitz, the author of requests.
R is a lot like vim or javascript. It has a lot of warts, but it's an incredibly expressive toolkit for its task. I usually buy into a language once I find a few extremely gifted developers working with it (and who seem to do so voluntarily). For instance: for vim it's Tim Pope, for R, it's Hadley Wickham, for javascript it's Mike Bostock.
Python, despite its many good decisions, is likewise full of warts. So, who are good developers to follow in the python/numpy community?