I'm a Matlab user myself, but I try to use Ruby whenever possible if for nothing else but to just get away from all the god damned matrices. I didn't realize Python had similar capabilities, I look forward to trying it out. But does Python have "Index exceeds matrix dimensions." errors? I just can't imagine life without seeing a few of those every day. That said, the workspace is really handy, is there some equivalent GUI in Python?
Check out EPD: http://www.enthought.com/products/, particularly the ETS framework. It contains almost all the popular scientific/numeric libraries in python and is free for academic use (and much of it is open-source).
As infinite8s points out, EPD from enthought is really quite nice.
Personally, I rather like Python XY ( http://www.pythonxy.com/ )though. It is totally free, open source, and for small little scripts I am a huge fan of the Spyder IDE. It lacks some of the features of bulkier IDEs so I also use Eclipse from time to time. But Spyder is light and much faster than Eclipse with every feature I would want when working on small projects that can be contained in just one or two files.
