I got this response re. octave as alternative to matlab:
I should make a note about this; I use octave a lot at home as it's rather
cheap (free). It can be an alternative in some instances but there are
some limitations with it:
* most importantly, the plotting system has plenty of caveats. legends
does not work properly, line annotation is poor, zooming panning etc is
missing. it is totally useless for 3D plots (workarounds exist but they
are rather messy IMO)
* it runs very poorly in windows using unix emulation libraries
* on mac, it relies on fink and macports. this installation has a few
problems, at least on my computer. it is not really possible to use
alt+tab with it since it is an X11 application.
* there is no GUI (and the CLI lacks the very useful !-command)
* it's rather slow compared to matlab
* many more advanced commands are missing (convolution only works with
some cases for example)
other than that I think it's rather ok. but I think it is only an
alternative on Linux/BSD where it came from.
I don't have a Matlab license, nor MS-Windows, nor Mac so I cannot answer
that parts. But the last two points troubles me. Are they true?