Anyone who runs up against a limitation of Octave has probably hit the point where they should consider switching, but not to Matlab or some other scripting language, but to Fortran or maybe Julia or something.

Therefore, I disagree with the accepted answer in that StackOverflow thread. The language is only good in the first place for short codes anyway, so fixing any little octave/matlab regionalisms is not a big deal. And, since it is a mathematical experiments, you should understand what every line of code does, so running the code without reading it is not really an option.