I did all my work and wrote my entire biomedical engineering (specifically medical image analysis) thesis on octave. In the beginning I had started with matlab

I did all my work and wrote my entire biomedical engineering (specifically medical image analysis) thesis on octave. In the beginning I had started with matlab because my lab mostly used matlab functions. Obviously it's not that I couldn't finish my work on matlab, but I found octave nicer to use, better publication-quality graphs, very friendly open-source community, submitted bugs typically fixed within a couple of days (which was not the case when I submitted bugs in matlab, of which I had reported plenty, particularly when it came to misbehaving graphics), interesting outlooks from studying its source code, ability to keep or distribute my code in the absence of a prohibitive matlab licence, etc. It is probably true that it is not necessarily as quick as matlab or julia these days, however there is a big red flag when one looks at "benchmarks" online, which is typically that these are used in such contrived ways that a proper octave user would probably not consider as good octave code. (I remember this was also true of julia's benchmarks against python for instance). Octave in fact is very powerful. Not to mention that to the serious user, much of its power comes from its incredibly powerful interface to its vast library of open-source c++-implemented functions. As for the why octave and not python (or any other X) question ... honestly, I don't know. E.g. why Linux and not Windows? Honestly, both are fine. But, without having an explicit list of arguments, I just find linux is more enjoyable and gets out of my way, whereas on windows I find myself having to do extra steps and double-check things at every turn. Well, somehow, I have the same vibe when working on octave vs python or julia. But that's not to say I don't enjoy those other languages too. To me it just feels Octave is just ... nicer and gets out of your way somehow. It's definitely my language of choice for quickly trying ideas out.