Minor aside: when I worked at Scilab I couldn't bear having to interact with a GUI so I got used to working either in complete CLI mode or sometimes in the part

Minor aside: when I worked at Scilab I couldn't bear having to interact with a GUI so I got used to working either in complete CLI mode or sometimes in the partial CLI mode if I wanted to use a specific GUI feature. I only needed it for interactive plots or interfaces (iirc), however if I had been using xcos I would have needed it. So I don't know about Matlab / octave but I don't think they're fundamentally linked to their GUI; at least not in the sense of the programming language.