For sure and I agree with many of the difficulties associated with MATLAB/Octave. When I want to put together a more complete piece of software that does thing

For sure and I agree with many of the difficulties associated with MATLAB/Octave. When I want to put together a more complete piece of software that does things like: have a GUI, interact with a database, network conductivity, or parse files, I think that MATLAB/Octave is a poor choice. A language like Julia tries to bridge that gap. My problem with Julia is that we don't get license coverage for things like SuiteSparse even with a JuliaPro license. MATLAB has done a fantastic job of dealing with this and is well worth my license fee every year, so that my customers and I don't have to deal with it. Till this changes, it's a nonstarter for me. As far as the differences in packages between MATLAB and Octave, I'll contend that it depends. For their lower level routines, they often use the exact same codes. Both use ARPACK for iterate eigenvalue solving. Both use various forms of SparseSuite, UMFPACK, LAPACK, and the like for their algebra. For me, I tend to only use these lower level routines, so there's little or no difference in performance or efficacy between the two. For the toolbox arena, I know there are differences and I agree that can be frustrating. I suppose my point is that it really depends where on the spectrum of lower level to higher level mathematical abstractions that we need. For low level abstractions, I feel that Octave works great and it's been a critical tool for me.