I agree octave is in a bad shape. Actually I read somewhere saying that R is actually faster than octave in term of computation--maybe just with poorer graph interface. Moreover, octave is very unfriendly to Windows users--unlike R, the only interface of octave in windows is via cygwin. However, the advantage of octave is that it can implement Matlab code without modification--in most cases. Sometimes there are nuisane.

Python's advantage? easy to use? quicker? Please tell us more.