Lush has several advantages and disadvantages over Matlab. Advantages:: (1) Lush is free/open source, which means it can take advantage of the innumerable open source libraries available on the Web (GSL, SDL, OpenCV, OpenRM....), and also profit from the considerable amount of work done by "People Like You"(tm). Open source libraries cannot be distributed with Matlab because of license incompatibilitites.
(2) Matlab code is very slow unless it is written in so-called "vectorized" form. Lush has no such problem: the compiler allows you to write your own "for" loops without performance penalty. (3) you can easily integrate with C (4) Lush is a full-fledged object-oriented programming language with a tried-and-true syntax, not a glorified script language with a funny syntax (not mentioning no real support for complex data structures).
This is particularly important if you develop medium-size or large applications (as opposed to quick hacks). (5) With Lush, no inefficient data shuffling ... more.
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