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Re:Fast high-level programming languages by lostmsu on Monday May 18, 2020 @08:58PM (#23230198)
He complains about compilation time, and does not try neither C# nor Java?

The choice of languages for this benchmark is laughable.

Re:Fast high-level programming languages by dang on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:06PM (#23230623)
Can you please make your substantive points without being a jerk on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re:Fast high-level programming languages by chadash on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @10:04AM (#23234970)
Both of these are good development languages, particularly for large projects. However, for bioinformatics or other science/academic projects, they have neither the wide range of libraries and ease of writing quick scripts that python has, nor the speed of something like C.

I think that for most academic uses, ease of development is really important. Remember, most of these people don't have CS backgrounds, which makes python a good choice because it's easy to learn and doesn't require much setup. It's main drawback is that it's slow, but this doesn't matter in many cases. When I was in grad school, I'd use a small dataset to try to figure out the best algorithm and then if I had to leave my computer running overnight to run on a larger dataset, it usually wasn't a big deal.

On the other hand, sometimes you just need something really fast. In that case, C is your darling.

Java/C# make lots of tradeoffs on both sides, which works well for software developers but not necessarily researchers (who don't have to worry about code being maintainable).

Re:Fast high-level programming languages by jmchuster on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:06PM (#23230250)
I guess such languages, which are defaults in the realm of web development, don't even come up for consideration in the realm of biology?
Re:Fast high-level programming languages by grawprog on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:15PM (#23230303)
Trying to get biologists to care about computers is like telling someone to be excited that they need to get all their wisdom teeth pulled and have a cavity filled on the same day. I was pretty much the oddity throughout all my schooling and any of the biologists I met while working that actually knew much of anything about computers and programming beyond what needed to be done to write reports and enter data.

Most biologists I met were far more comfortable in the pissing rain, up the mountain, in the middle of nowhere collecting animal shit than in front of a keyboard.

If there were a Venn diagram of biologists and computer and technology enthusiasts the overlap would need a micrometer to be read.

Disclaimer: Please take this extremely generalized and likely offensive to one of those small few in that tiny overlap I mentioned, statement with a grain of salt. Please don't take this too seriously, it's just from my own narrow sampling of people i've interacted with which is may or may not be representative of the overall population.

Re:Fast high-level programming languages by oefrha on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:04PM (#23230609)
You really need to learn more about bioinformaticians’ contributions to computing before making an ignorant and knowingly offensive comment like this.

Disclaimer: my background has absolutely no overlap with biology/bioinformatics.

Re:Fast high-level programming languages by grawprog on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @12:04AM (#23231172)
I know about bioinformatics and the contributions of biology to computer science and vice versa. I've personally worked in both field sampling and data analysis. My overly offensive generalized statement was a light jab towards field biologists i've known, including my own friends who i've debated on this subject with, who tend to dislike computers and will go as far to avoid even excel and hand write their data while doing all math on a calculator. It really wasn't meant to be taken seriously and I suppose would go above the head of those who haven't spent a lot of time in the field with biologists.
Re:Fast high-level programming languages by oefrha on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @01:18AM (#23231487)
Okay, sorry about the misinterpretation, but it should have been clear to you that ggp was referring to computational biologists or bioinformaticians, making your observations rather unrelated.
Re:Fast high-level programming languages by bjonnh on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:32PM (#23230408)
Bioinformaticians use Python,R,Java,Julia,Groovy,Js and more (I use kotlin and python mostly but that's in a niche of bioinformatics I don't touch genes nor proteins)... Same as in software dev, there are a lot of beliefs. So you have the club of the js people that hate java, the club of pythoners that hate R, and people that just use what allow them to solve their problem and they are the ones that achieve the most but also that you hear about the less.
Re:Fast high-level programming languages by pjmlp on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @10:17AM (#23235093)
Sure they are, life sciences companies use tons of Java and .NET.

In fact you might encounter some biologists using VB.NET after they outgrown their Excel VBA macros.

Re:Fast high-level programming languages by lostmsu on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:07PM (#23230632)
And that is the problem. I understand Julia and Python there. I'd understand Haskell (as every biologist is a mathematician too). But to list JS and Lua, and not have C# and Java?

AFAIK a lot of chemistry equipment actually is built with Java and C#.

Re:Fast high-level programming languages by strzibny on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:55PM (#23230555)
Not every article has to include $YOUR_FAVOURITE_LANGUAGE. Author probably chose what he knew or wanted to learn. To each its own.
Re:Fast high-level programming languages by lostmsu on Monday May 18, 2020 @10:05PM (#23230619)
IMO, that just speaks about the author as being prone to hype.
Re:Fast high-level programming languages by strzibny on Sunday May 24, 2020 @11:24PM (#23297482)
Why? Maybe, maybe not. We wouldn't know. There is nothing wrong in being interested in some new things that can help us approach things in new ways.
Re:Fast high-level programming languages by dcftoapv on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:02PM (#23230233)
I was confused by this as well. Java is my go to language when I'm trying to do things the right way.

Results in clear code, easy implementation, and good performance 95% of the time.