[BioRuby] Bioruby gems in Guix

[Pjotr Prins]

Amazing BioRuby coincidence: George and I bumped into each other by
accident in Nairobi airport terminal. It was a 30 minute window,
pretty much! Our eyes practically popped!  George is on his way to
defend his PhD thesis (wish him luck!) and I on my way to Zanzibar.
I'll meet up with George again in January to work on GNU Guix, among
other things.

Which reminds me, GNU Guix/Guile has a devroom at FOSDEM (Brussels,
Jan 30th, 2016) Very exciting - it is terrifically difficult to get
such a room. The devroom is about Guile (a LISP dialect named Scheme)
and the GNU package manager (in turn mostly written in Guile).

The more I work with LISP the more I realise how LISPy Ruby is. All
the stuff I like about Ruby is pretty much a LISP contribution -
except for the syntax. I find the Ruby syntax is a strength when it
comes to reading and maintaining code. So today, to me Ruby is really
a LISP with a great syntax (which is mostly derived from Smalltalk).
The stuff you learn...

Ruby is a great language. Be good to share that again after almost 15
years of Ruby (I wrote http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/5915 in
2002). Before that I wrote most code in C++ and Perl. Tody I still
write the bulk of my code in Ruby, even if I dabble in a range of
other languages and can not avoid Python with some collaborators. 

So, an early and very happy new year to all BioRubyistas! And pop over
to FOSDEM if you can. It is a great conference, one of the best.

Pj.

On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 11:50:34AM +0300, George Githinji wrote:
> Sounds awesome! :)
> 
> On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 2:50 AM, Pjotr Prins <pjotr.public14 at thebird.nl> wrote:
> > Several gems have gone into GNU Guix this week during the biohackathon
> > in Nagasaki, including BioRuby. I'll add references to to biogems.info soon.
> >
> >   http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/gnu/packages/bioinformatics.scm#n2707
> >
> > Note that installing bioruby will automatically pull in Ruby (latest)
> > and libxml. Also, the infamous nokogiri just works :). Main thing
> > missing at this point is cucumber.
> >
> > You can read my Ruby notes at
> >
> >   https://github.com/pjotrp/guix-notes/blob/master/RUBY.org
> >
> > Pj.