MATLAB may not be completely terrible

I use MATLAB a lot, but I wish I could use it less. I have a few reasons for not liking it:

• I prefer to use VIM and the command line for everything. The MATLAB IDE isn't my favorite.
• It's closed source (not optimal, but not necessarily a deal-breaker) and expensive (unless you're a student).
• Lots of useful code is sold as addons. The parallel computing toolbox, for example, is not included in the standard version of MATLAB.
• The language itself isn't as nice as Python is, at least for me. Language choice is a highly personal matter, however.

For these reasons, I am trying to install Numeric Python as a replacement for MATLAB. So far, it's a huge struggle. The value in having a working product out of the box is not insignificant. Python support on OS X isn't as strong as could be hoped, and the recent upgrade to Lion has also broken some dependencies. I am eschewing pre-built binaries for locally compiled versions to get around these issues. I'll update this post with resources.