In science doing things in a different way is good, not bad. If everybody uses the same tool you kill the cross-pollination between people with different skills

In science doing things in a different way is good, not bad. If everybody uses the same tool you kill the cross-pollination between people with different skills and innovation often comes from that. Exploring Bioperl for genetics leads to several big rewards, but you need to want to take the extra-mile and doing it. And is not easy. In the same way as exploring R in the past where none used it, was definitely benefical to me. R is awesome. All is readable if you find the correct people able to read it. People at the university just keep using the same as their boss so you really can't always choose. Maybe Perl wizards were highly sough and didn't remained in the university. Maybe is just a question of different generations of programmers and Perl is a little older. Dunno.