I'm an engineer who does a lot of "applied research" projects. I've used (still do some) octave quite a bit. There's nothing like octave (or MATLAB) for script

I'm an engineer who does a lot of "applied research" projects. I've used (still do some) octave quite a bit. There's nothing like octave (or MATLAB) for scripting to "get shit done." There is a plethora of packages and tools to do whatever you need. Need to import excel data and graph it? Octave is great. Need to connect to an sql database, pull data and export it? Octave. Linear algebra. Nuff said. It's a great tool for engineers / scientists who don't want to "program" (although you can!) and want readable syntax to just git r dun. Also, there's a shit ton of m code floating out there on the internet and in engineering schools / university research groups. Octave isn't 100% m compatible but if you don't have a special tool boxes & functions you can get them to run in octave with a little debugging. I love octave. It's gotten me out of a lot of binds.