[tpoacher]

You should use it because it's a super cool language, it's open source, and if people used it more to develop the package ecosystem a bit more, it would easily end up trumping all the others you mentioned.

Anecdotally, I used Octave during my PhD and it was a breath of fresh air (where matlab wasn't, for reasons I cant quite explain myself tbh).

I have also used (and still use) R, Python, and Julia. Octave is still the language I go to first to get things done fast.