Except in practice, to write fast Matlab code you need very deep understanding of Matlab’s internals and years of experience. Seemingly trivial patterns end up slowing your code down by multiple orders of magnitude, and there’s more “guess and check” involved when trying to write code that can be effectively JIT compiled by Matlab than careful reasoning. Even worse, the JIT and the profiler don’t get along, so it’s often impossible to get any insight into the reasons for JIT-related performance differences.
In general, Matlab is an extremely unpleasant and frustrating environment compared to almost any other language I’ve worked with. The only thing Matlab has on Python/Numpy is a nice quantity of publicly available code for various technical functions. Most of this code is hacky academic prototype stuff, but that’s much better than nothing if you’re trying to follow someone’s algorithm written up in a paper.
The Matlab GUI and tooling is a buggy and unpolished Java turd from the 90s which fits in poorly with any modern operating system.