[rustyhancock]

Similarly I'm not sure Octave ever really got that polish to compete with MATLAB.

SPSS is hilariously painful to use. Still it's only losing ground ever so slowly. PSPP remains almost unheard of among SPSS core users.

[3eb7988a1663]

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.

[gmueckl]

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.

[wolvesechoes]

> It just had to be decent enough to save $$$$ vs a Matlab license

And it failed at this.