GNU Octave: Scientific Programming Language
15 points by veqq
15 points by veqq
I love GNU octave. I had a single class in university which used Matlab, and I did alright using FOSS Octave instead of Matlab.
The semester I took numerical analysis the professor had actually switched the class to Octave. There apparently weren’t many changes, but he ensured that everything worked in Octave, whereas in previous years they’d used Matlab. It was an impressive tool!
Not 100% on topic, but every time I see “gnu octave”, I think it is the music notation program (which is actually “gnu lilypond”), since my brain associates “octave” with music, and even now, seeing the names a dozen times (and mixing them up a dozen times), it still confuses me a bit, so glad the title has “scientific proframming language” in it.
Wikipedia says both Octave and Lilypond are named after people the original authors knew - Octave is named for a former professor of the author, and Lilypond is a bit of a pun inspired by a friend’s name another audio program called Rosegarden.
Can anyone make the argument for GNU Octave over what I believe are it’s competitors, Julia and Python w/Numpy? (And MATLAB I suppose but that’s proprietary.) Is Octave used anywhere as a “killer app” or is it just cool?