[BioRuby] Restyling BioRuby.org

[Pjotr Prins]

Hi Mic,

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 03:41:07PM +1000, Mic wrote:
>    BioRuby must become faster in next generation sequence time.
>    Some of the mailing list member like D very much. How about BioD or BioGO
>    or BioVala instead of a BioRuby fork?

It is a very good idea to start a new project. Still we need to work
on BioRuby too. If you look at all the Bio* projects, you can see
that the statically typed languages don't do that well, including
BioJava. Dynamically typed languages have a lower threshold, and give
instant gratification. That is the key to understanding success in
bioinformatics ;).

We do, however, need fast back-end stuff. BioRuby needs to allow for
that (and we do in biogems), so the broader user base only needs to
know Ruby (or Python, or whatever).

We'll see more bindings to these other languages. A new BioD project -
I am sure someone will start - should aim to provide that.  

Focussing on D bioinformatics alone, however, will render you a small
community.  Check out the committers of BioJava, BioC, BioC++, etc. It
is my experience with BioScala too. Not to stop anyone, just saying
that Ruby, Python, Perl and R will remain mainstream for years to
come.

Pj.