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I switched to Python in 2011 (basically because Django was a lot easier to get into as web framework, better docs and because too many ways to do things made Ca

by collyw 8y ago

I switched to Python in 2011 (basically because Django was a lot easier to get into as web framework, better docs and because too many ways to do things made Catalyst confusing for a beginner). Perl was starting to loose ground by then, but was still pretty popular. My guess is around a third of bioinformaticans were using it as the goto language at that point. Its a pity, I miss Perl and still pull it out for quick scripts that involve manipulating the filesystem as its got so much better syntactic sugar for that sort of thing. And using regexes in Python is such a chore in comparison. I always need to look up the docs, whereas I remember how to use them in Perl despite hardly using the language in 8 years

dalke 8y ago
You might enjoy, in a "never try this in practice" sort of way, some code I did to make a working Python variant, which compiled to Python byte code, and supported Perl-like pattern match syntax, like: # get_function_names.py for line in open("python_yacc.py"): if line =~ m/def (?P<name>\w+) *(?P<args>$.*$) *:/: print repr($1), repr($args) See http://dalkescientific.com/Python/python4ply-tutorial.html http://dalkescientific.com/Python/python4ply-tutorial.html . It got appreciative hisses when I did a lightning talk about it at a PyCon. FWIW, I co-founded Biopython back in 1999.