Most engineers know about Matlab. Some engineers know about Octave. People treat Octave as a free replacement of Matlab. Only few people know about Scilab.
I have been using Octave for many years. As a programmer, I used to analyse problem before starting programming. Octave is also very useful for analysing massive data collected from the output of target system.
The only problem of Octave is the terrible GUI interface and I have been waiting for two years in order to get an update with stable GUI. No luck so far. So, I decide to switch to Scilab today.
Compared with Octave, the downloaded Scilab package is much smaller. The installation is smooth in my MacBook Pro. After launching the program, the GUI runs very well. All widgets are dockable. Here is my arrangement of widgets. All widgets can also be floating if you want.
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Unlike Octave, Scilab doesn't keep all syntax & rules of Matlab. So, it would be better if you go through the introduction before using it.
More information about Scilab can be found at www.scilab.org.
