I've never had to turn to Octave because I've always had an employer or University sponsored access to MATLAB, but I'm incredibly grateful this project exists. There is a ton of permissively licensed code written targeting MATLAB that is released for scientific and engineering purposes that would be DOA for many people without this project.
The origins of Octave are pretty amazing. Created essentially to support a single textbook and class in Chemical Engineering at UT Austin/UW Madison it is now nearly code compatible with a major commercial product and has been under continuous development for over 20 years.
I did use Octave during my university time even though the course I was doing recommended and used Matlab. And I think for nearly the entire course, Matlab commands were an one-to-one translation to Octave. I personally feel science should be done using open tools.
I know some people who use Matlab to take data and every once in a while their experiments "break" due to forgetting to update their licenses.
Also for a long time Matlab broke on systems using the new Linux network interface naming convention (i.e. en0 instead of eth0) since the license manager was stupid.
Well, I've no great love for FlexLM, but even less for changes to userspace that willfully break things in pursuit of this year's dubious concept of 'better'.
There are a few other minor perks to using Octave: it recognises more syntax than Matlab, it allows you to define functions anywhere, not just in function files, and slightly less insane semantics for some operations.
The biggest perk, however, is no license manager, and you can actually see all of the code, including the precise BLAS and LAPACK calls that we make. The backslash operator in Matlab is one of the juiciest secret sauces in mathematical computing.
Yes, I imagine the reason Matlab takes so long to start even with -nodesktop is the license manager. I mostly use Matlab/Octave as a glorified graphing calculator (anything complicated I do in ROOT) so the startup time really irks me. That said, I also of course appreciate that it's Free software.
And now that I realize that you're a (the?) core dev, I should say thank you!
Just a core dev. I actually have not been writing a lot of Octave code recently, and have faded into a more "managerial" or "support" role, helping with the website, the code hosting, and so forth. Other people have done a lot more coding than I recently.
Actually, most of my time has been spent talking to business people trying to grow our commercial support business so that Octave development can really take off.
For the people in my group, I have a stinking suspicion: they use matlab because it's called matlab. Also, they refuse to use octave, python, or anything else because they aren't called matlab.
The origins of Octave are pretty amazing. Created essentially to support a single textbook and class in Chemical Engineering at UT Austin/UW Madison it is now nearly code compatible with a major commercial product and has been under continuous development for over 20 years.
Kudos to the developers/maintainers.