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My favorite perl story: Had been working on parsing through huge flat text files with it, had over 40 lines going and just could not get it to work correctly. I
by arca_vorago 13y ago
My favorite perl story: Had been working on parsing through huge flat text files with it, had over 40 lines going and just could not get it to work correctly. I took a step back, rethought what I was trying to do, and wrote a one liner awk that just worked.
Side note: I have noticed that in bioinformatics, perl is largely being replaced with python in tool usage.
- Mithaldu 13y ago> I have noticed that in bioinformatics, perl is largely being replaced with python in tool usage. Which has honestly little to do with the language and more with the fact that the bioinformatics-related Perl books are the worst programming teaching books i have ever seen. (Honestly, a lot of the flak on perl goes back to old and outdated books.)
- arca_vorago 13y agoI would also venture that much of the transitions are feedback loops. So person A makes a new shiny in python for no reasons relating to superiority of language for job x, but because person A is good with it. Well, if what he makes is good, people start using it. Then it breaks, and they have to fix it, or maybe get an idea to fork it. Suddenly, person A's software just encouraged 20 people to hop into python for no real concrete reason. On the bio side, bio-python is just much more intuitive imho, vs bio-perl.
- collyw 13y agoMaybe that explains why some (all actually) of the really bad code have seen has been from Bioinfomaticians. I have seen terrible code in both Perl and Python though.