Re: [Nolug] Genome Sequencing uses: Perl

On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 11:03, Brett D. Estrade wrote:
> Don't forget about dynamic typing, cross platform compatibility, small
> learning curve for basic tasks, huge amount of modules, community
> support, ... what am I missing? Oh yeah - it rocks ;)

Python does all that too. (And I presume Ruby, but don't know
enough about it.)

> I think they say it makes the hard things easy and the impossible things
> possible....
>
> I use Perl for the majority of my work here at NRL, and if I have my way
> it will be the language of choice for most things :). I am continually
> amazed that some people still tolerate using fortran or c for simple
> tasks, file i/o, and string manipulation. The only thing you need
> fortran or c for are a few tasks that involve very intensive mathematical
> calculations, and even that code can be compiled and implemented as a sub
> in perl...

"Perl is worse than Python because people wanted it worse."
    Larry Wall, 10/14/1998

> Brett
>
> On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 10:53:49 -0500, "Ron Johnson" <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>
> said:
> > On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 10:45, Mark A. Hershberger wrote:
> > > Since someone on this list asked how much Perl was actually used in
> > > bioinformatics, I thought I'd share this. I'm in a discussion with
> > > someone at the Genome Sequencing Lab at WUSTL and he told me the
> > > following:
> > >
> > > Yes, Perl is the language of choice. Other languages (C, Java)
> > > are used very infrequently and their use are driven either by the
> > > needs of the program (C) or the knowledge of the developer (Java).
> > > Shell scripting is also used for small stuff.
> >
> > I'm sure it's because regex's are so efficient in Perl....

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA
An ad run by the NEA (the US's biggest public school TEACHERS 
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can find sodium and *chloride* in the periodic table of the elements.
And they wonder why people think public schools suck...
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