It has improved a lot. In the late 1990s it was decidedly behind the scripting languages of the time, and that's partly what I was referring to. And, the weir

It has improved a lot. In the late 1990s it was decidedly behind the scripting languages of the time, and that's partly what I was referring to. And, the weird lack-of-speed issues. It used to be that you could implement a matrix multiply, in an m-file, that would be faster than the builtin *. I benchmarked this myself.