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Bioinformatician here. It's certainly a drawback. There is no quesiton that Python etc. are more expressive and quick to write in than C are. Some bioinformatic
by jakobnissen 6y ago
Bioinformatician here. It's certainly a drawback. There is no quesiton that Python etc. are more expressive and quick to write in than C are. Some bioinformaticians swear to static languages for reasons other than speed (e.g. static type checking).
There is always a need for scripting languages. Not just for speed of development, but for interactive data manipulation and visualization. Static languages are a no-go in that regard.
My bet in on Julia. Although slower than C by itself, I think in practice, Julia code written by bioinformaticians will be faster than C code wrapped in Python, or C libraries used in inefficient workflows from the shell. That's certianly been my experience so far.
- thu2111 6y agoWhy not take a look at Kotlin? High level, statically typed, fast iteration, good runtime performance, great support for parallelism (via Java's APIs for it).
- jakobnissen 6y agoI very well might! As I said, I really do need an interactive language for some (most?) tasks, but it would be nice to complement it with a static language. I've been drawn to Rust since it seems to be enjoyable and less full of arcane obscurities than C/C++, but I'll take a look at Kotlin.
- thu2111 6y agoThere's a Kotlin REPL and IntelliJ has this feature called 'workspaces' that's meant for interactive use. But it's not the primary focus of the team, for sure.