Based on a tip on Stack Overflow, I just discovered Scilab, a FOSS (free/open source software) equivalent to Matlab. Then I discovered that I had actually only rediscovered it: Scilab was already installed on my computer. Maybe my scientific software collection needs a cleanup.

Anyway, as I mentioned, Scilab aims to do basically what Matlab does. It’s an admirable goal, but I’m not such a fan of the program itself, for a couple of reasons: first, at least on Linux, it looks ugly, and more importantly, the GUI seems to lack some of the basic functionality that people tend to expect these days, like scrolling. If you’re a fan of xterm then perhaps Scilab is for you, but otherwise it’s kind of inconvenient to use. For the rest of us, the need for a Matlab equivalent is pretty well filled by Python with Numpy/Scipy and matplotlib, plus your terminal of choice. Python also has the benefit of being a general-purpose programming language, so once you learn it for numerical computation, you can do all sorts of other cool things with it.