Octave-Forge (http://octave.sourceforge.net/ http://octave.sourceforge.net/) is kind of a necessity to bring Octave closer to parity with Matlab, since a lot of

Octave-Forge (http://octave.sourceforge.net/ http://octave.sourceforge.net/) is kind of a necessity to bring Octave closer to parity with Matlab, since a lot of the reason (at least for me) to use Matlab in the first place (as opposed to Python+Numpy+Scipy+... or Julia or in some cases R) is the wide variety of useful packages for whatever domain you're in...