In several cases over the years, I’ve inherited matlab code and tried to run it on octave. Never worked, once. There were always just one small missing syntax,

In several cases over the years, I’ve inherited matlab code and tried to run it on octave. Never worked, once. There were always just one small missing syntax, function, edge case of handling filenames... Once I inherited code written for octave. Did its job, worked like a charm, mostly. The CLI interface was clunky compared to typical shell tools so I had to do some shell wrappers and incantations to automate what I wanted. I don’t know if this is due to the author or to octave but I suspect its focus is on interactive use to the detriment of developing programs. I keep a jupyterlab docker container running at all times on my win10 laptop, with windows-home mounted. Instantly available notebooks from my browser - works like a charm for interactive use. I much prefer python since it lets you move continuously from one-off hack in a notebook cell to a web scale application, parses any weird file, serves web content in 3 lines, etc.