[BioRuby] Beautiful code for Bioinformatics

[Fields, Christopher J]

I think understanding concepts in classic and modern programming languages, and their advantages and disadvantages, is considerably more important than the language itself.  VM's like JVM, Mono, Parrot, etc allow one to cross over from one language to another (sometimes within the same module space), so the adage about which lang is best seems very trite now.

Anyway, anytime I see someone pipe up (on SO, reddit, etc) with a big trolly 'lang A is better than lang B' thread, I invariably find the most interesting responses are from those who can clearly point out the advantages and disadvantages of both languages.  Inevitably the conclusion is every language has its flaws, the choice is very much based on one's opinions, and that concepts and specifications are way more important to know than specific implementations of them (and knowledge of such allows one to migrate more effortlessly between languages).

(my rant for the day, sorry, need coffee)

chris

On Feb 17, 2012, at 2:38 AM, Pjotr Prins wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 10:32:38AM +0300, George Githinji wrote:
>> Tango development might not have stopped and tango has now been ported
>> to D2 see this announcement
>> http://forum.dlang.org/thread/jgagrl$1ta5$1@digitalmars.com
> 
> Indeed. Even if Tango had been dropped, it would not be a good reason
> to say D has 'issues'. Saying that software libraries are not
> maintained is rubbish - how many Ruby modules do you think are not
> maintained?
> 
> ...
> I believe multi-language programming is necessary for big data
> analysis. The reason is parallel computing and efficient data
> structures. You may want to read our book chapter on language
> bindings in
> 
>  Sharing programming resources between Bio* projects through remote
>  procedure call and native call stack strategies
> 
>  by Pjotr Prins, Naohisa Goto, Andrew Yates, Laurent Gautier, Scooter
>  Willis, Christopher Fields and Toshiaki Katayama
> 
>  chapter 21 in Evolutionary Genomics: statistical and computational
>  methods, ed. Anisimova M. within Meth. Mol.  Biol. Series of
>  Humana-Springer 2012 
> 
> coming out in a month from now :). Notice the authors are from Perl, Python,
> Java and Ruby communities.
> 
> Pj.