GNU Octave is a great project.

Yet, the replacement for MatLab appears, at least to me, to be Python. The abundance of resources due to its general purposeness swamps Octave/MatLab's niche tailoring. Python is a mire flexible tool for STEM because it supports a broader array of applications.

Python does not replace the Matlab language itself. For as long as we have Matlab code, we will need Octave.

My hope is to make Octave as obsolete as Matlab itself, but so far neither is. Matlab is huge and Python has not unthroned it. It will take a combined effort to do so. Octave is but another contributor to this effort.

In that sense Linux doesn't replace other Operating Systems. But of course it does and that's the sense in which I used the word "replace". As with Windows and Linux, Python is used in lieu of MatLab frequently for new applications as the total number of applications grows.

MatLab is also often replaced by R these days.

Programming languages are not quite like operating systems (and even Linux has Wine). When you have a large codebase written in some language, you can't just easily throw it out and rewrite the whole thing in another language. Programming languages never really die out: COBOL is still used these days.

There is a lot of Matlab code out there, and it needs something to run in other than Matlab. That's why Octave is still important.

I didn't suggest Octave wasn't important as an alternative for MatLab. I stated my opinion that Python appears to be replacing MatLab in the niches where it dominates. If there is a new project, Python is likely to be a competitive alternative to MatLab or Octave.

You've heard of Julia?

http://julialang.org/

To a first approximation based upon the number of times I have heard of Julia relative to the number of times I have heard of Python: nope, never heard of it.

Julia looks like a fine language. Just not being Python is enough for me to assume it's better than Python.

But I'm describing is's not ought's. If I was in charge of the ought's third graders would be learning J. I'm not. They aren't.

Python is the clear winner. There are many other useful alternatives - another commenter mentioned Julia - but part of the reason Python wins is because it is so pervasive. It is easy to find examples and help online, and for scientists, getting results is the most important part, so anything to speed development is important.

Godspeed! I love to see FLOSS projects explicitly aiming to take market share from proprietary incumbents. Is anyone actively "selling" adoption of Octave? Presumably Matlab has a significant sales effort. At least there's https://gnu.org/software/octave/commercial-support.html a page too often missing from FLOSS project sites.

> Is anyone actively "selling" adoption of Octave?

Not quite. I am going try to to be the one doing that selling. I'm meeting someone today to discuss how to start that business.

Anything that takes away from MatLab is good in my eyes. I have never had a good experience with it.

Granted, I've only ever used it for school, but it is always incredibly painful to work with. I like Octave much better.

My biggest complaint about the uses I encountered in school is that it wasn't taught as a way to do things, it was taught as the way to do things.

It was never "here's what it means to do X, and here's how to do X in matlab", it was "to do X, do this in matlab".

It seems like one of those tools that fosters such thinking.

Absolutely. My experience was that MatLab was used as a series of magic steps to accomplish what we were really after: analysis of physical systems.

The impression I get of MathWorks is that they would like to be the walled garden of engineering tools. Don't ask how it works, don't try to do it differently, just use these commands to do these certain things.

Oh wow, awesome to run into an Octave dev on here. Thanks for making such useful software!

Good luck!

That's a great idea! Good luck!