Re:Bioinformatics and the joy of Perl6
by bane on Monday December 15, 2014 @09:22AM
(#8752054)
I work next to a bioinformatics team, they split their work between Perl, Python, C and Java depending.
Perl is mostly used in the niches it's traditionally good at, munging data or cleaning it up with quick to write one-off scripts. The data is then fed into a higher performance C or Java program for the actual analysis.
They tried to use Python for that kind of task, but the language is stricter than Perl (you end up writing lots of exception handling code) and the text gobbling faculties are just ever so slightly not as good and it ends up just being easier and quicker to Perl the problem away. However, the newer folks are coming in not knowing Perl at all and it's likely it will simply go away in a few years and everything will be done in Python anyways.
Python and Java tend to be used on the back-end of the web reporting systems they build since there's better server-side support and tooling for that case. And I think some of the analytic tools are cross platform Java desktop clients.
Perl is mostly used in the niches it's traditionally good at, munging data or cleaning it up with quick to write one-off scripts. The data is then fed into a higher performance C or Java program for the actual analysis.
They tried to use Python for that kind of task, but the language is stricter than Perl (you end up writing lots of exception handling code) and the text gobbling faculties are just ever so slightly not as good and it ends up just being easier and quicker to Perl the problem away. However, the newer folks are coming in not knowing Perl at all and it's likely it will simply go away in a few years and everything will be done in Python anyways.
Python and Java tend to be used on the back-end of the web reporting systems they build since there's better server-side support and tooling for that case. And I think some of the analytic tools are cross platform Java desktop clients.