Re: [Nolug] Genome Sequencing uses: Perl

From: Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson_at_cox.net>
Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 19:12:39 -0500
Message-Id: <1064621559.3317.39.camel@haggis>

On Fri, 2003-09-26 at 18:43, Brett D. Estrade wrote:
> No doubt .. might I add that Perl is much nearly ubiquitous on *nix
> machines - thats the part that makes Perl most useful to my job :)

True, since it's progeny are sed, awk & grep.

> Brett
>
> On Fri, 26 Sep 2003 18:27:05 -0500, "Ron Johnson" <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>
> said:
> > 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
The difference between drunken sailors and Congressmen is that 
drunken sailors spend their own money.
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Received on 09/26/03

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