&gt; it looks like the biggest loser to Julia&#x27;s rise might be Octave.<p>It&#x27;s not a competition. Julia is our friend, not a rival to Octave. We&#x27;re on good terms with their developers. Occasionally we share ideas and patches back and forth when it makes sense. They&#x27;ve asked me for help with their Octave benchmark and I&#x27;ve gladly provided it.<p>Octave being unnecessary is Octave&#x27;s ultimate goal. When nobody cares about Matlab, probably nobody will care about Octave either. But as long as people care about Matlab, Octave will be relevant. Or perhaps, in a perfect world, enough people will stop caring about Matlab that Octave can start leading in fixing the biggest stupidities in the programming language (we already do this to some degree, but keep relenting and replicating Matlab&#x27;s bugs because code depends on those bugs).<p>If Julia is gaining the minds of people in scientific computing, great. It&#x27;s going to take them away from Matlab and Octave to equal degree. If we can all do our computing unfettered by proprietary licenses, I don&#x27;t care if it means we end up using Octave or Julia as long as we stop using Matlab.<p>And many of Matlab&#x27;s alleged proponents keep turning to Octave. Octave still fills a niche that Julia does not: being able to use Matlab code freely.