I'm with you. When you are doing things as your day-to-day learning the syntax and gotchas associated with whatever language are pretty easy, but when you come

I'm with you. When you are doing things as your day-to-day learning the syntax and gotchas associated with whatever language are pretty easy, but when you come at it every once in a while working with Octave or Matlab are so much easier. I can see the benefit that tooling provides, but from a getting-started standpoint, reducing the complexity makes you significantly more productive. You can concentrate on learning the concepts and not the language nuances. For someone who already knows and works with numpy or r, Octave might not be necessary. Then again, it's not like its particularly hard to pick up Octave and be able to work with it.