In practice it seems like Octave isn’t a great alternative to MATLAB in industry because so many industrial customers use proprietary MathWorks packages (eg Simulink) that are missing in Octave.
The fundamental problem is MATLAB/Octave simply aren’t as useful as Python for real world stuff (a bit of syntactical awkwardness around linear algebra is worth painless web access and system IO). The languages also aren’t as nice as R for statistics and machine learning. And nowadays they don’t have much performance benefit either. In most cases I think Octave/MATLAB provide too little benefit and too many drawbacks.
Octave is a great option as a personal calculator, and be the best option for small mechanical/electrical engineering firms. MATLAB code is unusually clear and expressive for numerical calculus and linear algebra, so are a good choice for problem domains where the math is very complicated but the dataset isn’t terribly large (e.g., models of crack formation in ceramics). I worked at a place that used Octave to run a free MATLAB script that did some very complicated microeconomics: a lot of very smart professors have written many useful algorithms in MATLAB, so being able to run them without porting is nice.
But I think Python and R have, sadly, made MATLAB as a language mostly obsolete for future development. The real relevance is MATLAB as an analysis tool with lots of MathWorks goodies.
The fundamental problem is MATLAB/Octave simply aren’t as useful as Python for real world stuff (a bit of syntactical awkwardness around linear algebra is worth painless web access and system IO). The languages also aren’t as nice as R for statistics and machine learning. And nowadays they don’t have much performance benefit either. In most cases I think Octave/MATLAB provide too little benefit and too many drawbacks.
Octave is a great option as a personal calculator, and be the best option for small mechanical/electrical engineering firms. MATLAB code is unusually clear and expressive for numerical calculus and linear algebra, so are a good choice for problem domains where the math is very complicated but the dataset isn’t terribly large (e.g., models of crack formation in ceramics). I worked at a place that used Octave to run a free MATLAB script that did some very complicated microeconomics: a lot of very smart professors have written many useful algorithms in MATLAB, so being able to run them without porting is nice.
But I think Python and R have, sadly, made MATLAB as a language mostly obsolete for future development. The real relevance is MATLAB as an analysis tool with lots of MathWorks goodies.