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Nice post, I've used Maxima for symbolic calculations since 2000 and I can say it was a great help during my student life :).

Since Maxima is based on Common Lisp, I think it will be an interesting application to translate directly, using a Lisp macro for example, the Fortran output generated by Maxima to a Matlab compatible expression. Not sure how easy it will be to implement this functionality, but sure it will be a nice addition to Maxima.

Maxima is extremely hackable, because it's entirely written in Lisp. I remember making modifications to the tex() function some years ago because it didn't use the particular notation that I liked, and it wasn't hard at all.

Does anybody know how Maxima compares to Sage?

http://sagemath.org/

I got the impression that Maxima isn't being maintained very actively. Last release was 2009, apparently, but there may be more to that story.

Sage uses Maxima among others open source packages [1]. You can think of it as a unified layer and language (Python) that enables you to use many open source mathematical programs behind the scenes.

[1] http://sagemath.org/links-components.html

I was just wondering if there is a MATLAB compatible library for Control Toolkit in octave so I can use the code I write at school for learning at home.

Using Maxima Output in Octave