Most of my scientific career I’ve relied on Matlab for algorithm development. But recently I’ve started exploring programming in Python. The benefits for scientists of converting to Python from Matlab are laid out in this Blog post.
Being on sabbatical has given me the freedom to retool, and for the first time I attend PYCON, a conference devoted to python programmers from all disciplines. I enjoyed the conference, and I’ve started working in Python more this spring, but I suspect that for the foreseeable future I will have a foot in both camps. There are just too many toolkits written for geophysics in Matlab to let go entirely! One example is matGPR, a wonderful processing package for ground penetrating radar data written by Andreas Tzanis that I prefer over the commercial packages because I can easily add my own tools.
For now I will continue to work with both, but which do I teach my students?