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Perl has always been designed from a get-things-done point of view, rather than adhering to a particular philosophy. It also has a huge number of well-maintaine
by ggchappell 13y ago
Perl has always been designed from a get-things-done point of view, rather than adhering to a particular philosophy. It also has a huge number of well-maintained libraries available. These are both big plusses in some contexts.
(Not speaking for myself here, BTW. A decade ago I tried Python & never looked back.)
In your case, part of the problem may not be due so much to the language, as to the authors of those scripts you mention. People who have not studied software development as their primary discipline have typically not been exposed to ideas about good design, writing maintainable code, etc.
- Blahah 13y agoYeah I agree the programmers whose code I'm reading are likely skewing the sample. But, as anecdata, when I moved to my current lab I requested that we not code in perl because people were writing unreadable, unmaintainable code. When we stiched to Ruby en masse, people really pulled it out of the bag and we now have really quite a nice codebase. I think the very strong community focus on standards in Ruby helped that along, as did the basic aesthetic of the language.
- chrisseaton 13y agoDo you know many scientists who code in Ruby? Is any of your code open source? I'm interested in scientific uses of Ruby.
- Blahah 13y agoYes, I know quite a few. In computational genomics in the south-east UK there's us (University of Cambridge Plant Sciences), Queen Mary University (Yannick Wurm's group), and The Sainsbury Lab at the John Innes Centre in Norwich (Dan Maclean's lab). In-progress code for my PhD is mostly on Github: http://github.com/Blahah http://github.com/Blahah See also BioRuby, biogems.info, sequenceserver.com