Bioinformatics largely takes a similar approach. Because the field is rooted in Statistics, statistical theories are often prototyped in GNU R by Ph.Ds without

Bioinformatics largely takes a similar approach. Because the field is rooted in Statistics, statistical theories are often prototyped in GNU R by Ph.Ds without formal computer science backgrounds. While statistically sound, R implementations often lack the performance properties necessary to crunch large datasets. This is where those of us with backgrounds in computation will optimize and parallelize code using lower level languages. There is no shame in starting from a scripting language. I often prototype ideas using R, Perl or Python before finalizing them in C, Java, OpenCL, etc.