Scilab is ancient; I was using it in grad school. They also made a decision at one point to make it just slightly incompatible with Matlab, which was probably a mistake. Octave is actually better at this point; they've managed to reproduce the best of Matlab's UI, which was always quite good.<p>While I rarely develop things in Matlab, it is worth noticing that it is a very elegant way of expressing linear algebra and numeric oriented programs. Python is a vastly more useful language, but numerics are an afterthought, and expressing numerics is abominable in Python. When I'm looking up how to implement some classic numerics algorithm, the Matlab way is usually concise and its vector oriented operations are usually the right way to express it in any interpreted language, as it keeps you in Lapack-land (remember, Matlab's origins were a repl for Eispack/Linpack).