this is the way. octave or matlab.

people like to complain about matlab as a programming language but if you're using it that way you're doing it wrong.

matlab (the core language) is awesome for expressing matrices and vectors and their operations as well as visualizing the results. matrix expressions in matlab look almost identical to how they look in mathematical notation (or how one might write them in an email). you shouldn't be using programming language flow control (or any of the other programming language features), you should be learning how to write for loops as vector and matrix operations and learning from the excellent toolboxes.

IMO, the issue is that "Scientific computing" covers several disparate use cases.

When you care about the math, Mathematica. It's a replacement for several pages of hand-written math, or a chalkboard.

When you care about the result, MatLab. It's a replacement for your calculator, and maybe Excel.

When you care about the resulting software? Python/Julia/Fortran.