I’m a programmer who knows Python, Ruby and some C who is trying to decide whether to learn GNU Octave or MATLAB. I know that they have a lot in common, but it isn’t clear to me how similar the syntax is or even the data structures are. The above link shows several examples where they are syntactically similar or identical. Is this true for the whole language?
I am trying to learn the language in general to do more scientific computing, possibly using some image analysis libraries.
Additionally, is MATLAB worth the cost?