One of my bioinformatics courses "required" MATLAB because the class project was based on a simulation framework called the COBRA Toolbox which was developed in MATLAB[1]. I didn't know who to ask about obtaining a MATLAB license, so instead I just got it to work in Octave and used that. I was pleasantly surprised at how little I had to tweak before the framework just worked in Octave, given that as far as I know everyone in the lab that develops the framework just uses MATLAB.
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One of my bioinformatics courses "required" MATLAB because the class project was based on a simulation framework called the COBRA Toolbox which was developed in MATLAB[1]. I didn't know who to ask about obtaining a MATLAB license, so instead I just got it to work in Octave and used that. I was pleasantly surprised at how little I had to tweak before the framework just worked in Octave, given that as far as I know everyone in the lab that develops the framework just uses MATLAB.
[1] http://opencobra.sourceforge.net/openCOBRA/Welcome.html