Rachel Applefield's Page

hey Rachel welcome to the group.

Hey Rachel, Responding to your question to Mika (I hope you don't mind) -

Rachel: I'm learning perl, b/c from what i hear a lot of bioinformatics is done in perl and there are lots of perl and bioperl libraries of programs. python, b/c that's what Google told me to learn (Don't ask why i was there...lol. suffice it t say, it was a complete accident). would u recommend diff. lang's?

Many developers get pretty religious when it comes to language choice so you have to be careful to sort preferences from well reasoned arguments. That being said, most people agree some languages lend themselves to certain domains more than others. In my opinion, Perl is a great text processing language, but is a poor choice for large complex systems. An object oriented language would probably be a better choice. If you want to go with something scripty, Ruby or Python are great languages. On the statically typed side I recommend Java or C#. There are plenty of biotech libraries available for Python, Java and C#. I assume the same is true for Ruby, but I have less experience with the language.

Having worked with biotech customers, I know exactly what you mean about a lot of biotech applications being written in Perl. I think this is the unfortunate consequence of Perl being a language a lot of scientists used first for historical reasons. The code I encountered was horribly obfuscated and clearly written by people that weren't thinking about how easy it would be for others to maintain and extend. Although its possible to write clean maintainable Perl code I rarely see this happen. OO languages like Java and Python were designed to help manage complexity. In the biotech domain this is often a necessity.