What language - platform use to data acquisiton/numerical work?

[Matteo]

Thank you all for the contributions.

I have understood that Python is good for GUIs, for serial port data
acquisition and for numercal computation.

My only problem is that MatLab has some huge numerical libraries that
Phyton does not have. I have to do experiments with pattern recognitin
algoritmhs (pca, neural networks etc.) and these are already
efficently coded in MatLab. I can't afford the effort to code a radial
basis function network from scratch (I'm able to do it, but it's
tiring and very time consuming).
So I'd like to use pyhon for all except numerical computation. I've
seen Pymat to conetct MatLab to Python, but it seem a little outdated
and unsupported. Is there any other way to embed MatLab into Python?

Thank you in advance,

Matteo Della Torre