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Sorry if this is off-topic, but as someone who once sat through a four-hour compile of Octave several years ago and never touched it again, what exactly are the advantages of using Octave and R compared with the standard SciPy stack? (IPython, matplotlib, numpy, sympy, scipy, etc.)

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4 hours to compile? I see you're using Mac OS X. This is why I really dislike source distribution in general, and I get very frustrated with Mac OS X users who praise homebrew. It really is not a very good distribution mechanism.

As to your second point for why Octave and not R or Python, my stance as an Octave dev is that you should use R or Python. But if you don't want to rewrite all of that Matlab code, tutorials, and papers out there and you still think they should run in something other than Matlab, that is when you use Octave.

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