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.

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gmueckl 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	tstenner 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Which often means that e.g. loading an image for displaying it increases cost by a few thousands