I would like to give up some love to the Octave team: First, it is a super solid platform and shows a lot of promise for the future as the build system gets ir

I would like to give up some love to the Octave team: First, it is a super solid platform and shows a lot of promise for the future as the build system gets ironed out. Second, although R and Python are a lot more fashionable these days, for some good reasons and some bad, Matlab syntax is the closest thing to actual mathematics. (Some features like cell arrays and 1-based indexing may seem odd to a Algol/ Pascal/ C/ Perl/ Python/ Java programmer, it can handle any data structure with as much grace as these more "traditional" syntaxes.) Third, Matlab has a huge share of the numeric / math world (for good reason, I think), and a plug in replacement is HUGE for us free software communist hippies.