[BioRuby] Beautiful code for Bioinformatics

[Pjotr Prins]

I have written about D and Scala in 'Ruby is a pony, Scala is a
thoroughbred, D is a dragon'.

  http://blog.thebird.nl/?p=93

There is more on Scala examples on that site too. I may add D stuff in
the future. We all need to write more about software and programming.

Over the last year I prefer to program in Ruby and D - they are at
both ends at the convenience vs.  performance spectrum ;). D natively
links against C libraries, something I like a lot (saves a lot of data
copying). There will be biogem examples of bindings soon. Also the
LLVM version of D2 is doing well, D will become part of Fedora and
Debian based systems.

If the JVM complex 'ecosystem' is no big issue, JRuby and Scala are
also a brilliant match. You can check out my BioScala code and
documents on github.  JRuby is a great performer, so that may come
naturally to you. Ruby gems work really well on the JVM, even when
written in C.  The JRuby developers have done a remarkable job.

Personally, I think it boils down to background and experience. C/C++
programmers I see taking to D like a fish to water. People with a Java
background may well prefer the JVM. Even after the balanced choice for
D, I really miss some of the niceties of Scala. I guess, if I were
programming Scala, I would do less in Ruby.

I would strongly suggest to buy and read both Andrei's D book and
Martin's Scala book. They are both classics in their own right - and
see what appeals to you most. 

D and Scala are both next generation (strongly typed) languages
designed by geniuses. They both work well with Ruby.

Pj.

On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 04:02:26PM -0800, Russell Whitaker wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 3:35 PM, Raoul Bonnal <bonnal at ingm.org> wrote:
> >[SNIP]
> > PS: I'm studing D :-)
> >
> 
> Do tell: what do you like about D? For that matter, have you evaluated Scala?
> I've been curious about both...
> 
> -- 
> Russell Whitaker
> http://twitter.com/OrthoNormalRuss / http://orthonormalruss.blogspot.com/
> http://www.linkedin.com/pub/russell-whitaker/0/b86/329
>