Re: lush vs matlab (was: JPush)

I want to pick up on a few things here and will respond in
several postings.

On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Yann LeCun wrote:

> In my mind, the void that Lush fills is that of an open-source,
> convenient, and flexible language for "numerical" research,
> prototyping, and rapid development.  This is a space that Matlab,
> pynum, and a few others are attempting to fill, but they all have
> problems and limitations. For example Matlab (besides being non open
> source) is not really designed as a full-fledged programming language,
> and limits the size and complexity of projects that can be developed
> with it.

I strongly agree, this is what I hoped to get when I installed
lush. I have been using matlab for a few years now and have good
and bad things to say about it. It's very strengths are

- comes with an ide featuring an integrated source level debugger
- has a compact API (many commands do a variety of things) which
   makes it easy to learn
- good visualization capabilities for 1d and 2d data, including
   facilities for creating publication quality figures
- the universal data type are arrays; once this is absorbed by a
   user, matlab is an excellent rapid prototyping environment
- very good documentation (online and offline); once you grabbed
   the basic concepts, you can work with matlab without ever
   looking into a manual again (using the online help)
- there's a rich set of toolboxes
- everybody uses it (share code with your friends and colleagues)

its weak points are
- poor as a language (OO model is lousy; it has no other high-level
   data types like hash tables; no module system)
- lousy performance if you cannot express your problem in terms of
   a few array operations
- awkward to interface with C code (although that it's possible
   at all and well documented is a pro)
- no memory mapped files mechanism
- closed source
- expensive


That said, there are very few points where lush beats matlab
currently. These are cost, performance and the ability to
interface with c and c++ code (did I forget anything?)

so advertising lush as a matlab alternative (on the lush homepage)
is misleading--at least for now. But this is what we should be aiming
at, I think: making lush a serious alternative to environments like
matlab, scilab, octave, python+scipy, etc.

To that end, my own current priorities (whishlist) are:
- an ide with graphcial source level debugger (like eclipse)
- better visualization tools (interfacing vtk?)

and on the language side:
- lexical scoping
- a module system (i.e., namespaces)
- compiler support for the whole language

I'm also not so sure about Ogre; we might get to a more powerful
and well designed GUI toolkit faster by interfacing to one of the
major GUI systems (Qt, wxWidgets, GTK, GnuStep, etc.).

my two pfennigs,
ralf




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