Comment by 3eb7988a1663
10 hours ago
I am not sure Octave ever had to put on that much polish. It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license. If it can drop-in run the code that has been keeping the lab going for decades, good enough.
MathWorks offers a huge list of "toolboxes", domain specific extensions that cover a lot of features in each domain. Replacing Matlab isn't about the core language alone.
Which often means that e.g. loading an image for displaying it increases cost by a few thousands
The price tags are wild for sure. But the sheer number of supported features is what makes them attractive. Cloning that completely is practically infeasable.
> It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license
And it failed at this.
I did my PhD with Octave. Sure, I did not have this nice convex optimization toolbox. But I had everything else I needed and did not need to wait because people arrived earlier in the lab and grabbed all floating licenses of, for instance, the communications toolbox.
However, I switched to Python during the last years.