Re: [Lush-users] Re: lush vs matlab (was: JPush)

Hi Ralph,

I'll add my two centimes to your two pfennigs.
I largely agree with what you say.

The IDE thing would be quite nice, though I don't see it myself as
indispensable. I suppose making a plugin for Eclipse would be
possible, although we would need to modify the reader to keep track of
line numbers in source files.

While more debugging tools would be great (particularly graphic
tools), you could view the interpreter itself as a super debugger on
which to build.

There is definitely a need for better visualisation tools.
A simplified set of functions that do more behind your back 
(a la Matlab) would be nice. That's very easy to do. 
A simpler array-slicing-and-dicing syntax (a la Matlab)
rather than all the calls to select/narrow/etc would also
be nice and easy to implement.

We just need a few more inspired volunteers....

  -- Yann


On Wednesday 02 November 2005 08:20 pm, Ralf Juengling wrote:
> 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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