In my opinion it is absolutely 100% worth "developing" Octave (the word 'maintain' makes it sound like it's an otherwise static project). The improvements from

In my opinion it is absolutely 100% worth "developing" Octave (the word 'maintain' makes it sound like it's an otherwise static project). The improvements from 3 to 4 were massive. The improvements from 4 to 5 equally so. I can't wait to try 6. In any case, it is definitely not just a tool for running 'old matlab scripts'. It is a beautiful language and environment in its own right, and if academia manages to wake up at some point they would invest in it for the open source environment that it is, in a way similar to python, and help it get even more amazing.