I work with folks in electrical controls and there's still a fair amount of modeling in Simulink. Although Octave doesn't replicate Simulink, a good amount of

I work with folks in electrical controls and there's still a fair amount of modeling in Simulink. Although Octave doesn't replicate Simulink, a good amount of code is still in MATLAB. For me, I own both a MATLAB license as well as use Octave. Personally, I find Octave easier to work with than MATLAB when developing applications because (1) It avoids the often times broken license manager and starts faster and (2) Has a more reasonable, integrated connection to the machine C compiler for debugging mex files. Especially for reason (1), my clients also prefer to use Octave when possible. That said, we often need to do production runs in MATLAB because they tend to use more updated numerical libraries than Octave. For example, Octave still has not migrated to SPQR from CSparse. All that said, Octave has provided us with an amazing, reliable tool. It is not well suited for everything. It is incredibly well suited for implementing and rapid prototyping many kinds of numerical algorithms that take advantage of the ease of access to linear algebra operations.