Re: [tlug] perl? (was: Employment for "oldies")

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 4:22 PM, Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com> wrote:
> No huge codebase can be "quickly rewritten" in any language. I would further
> argue that Python is a worse choice than modern Perl for large projects,
> given their equivalent expressive power and Perl's much richer library
> ecosystem (CPAN). Python wins in scientific / numerical computing due to its
> excellent libraries in that area.


Perl is still one of the main language for bioinformatics, but it is
starting to share the field with others.  As Python's use in
undergraduate CS curriculums grows [1], these graduates enter into
interdisciplinary areas like bioinformatics, which can then influence
projects.  But this takes time...

Perl was popular when the area of bioinformatics starting growing
rapidly and I guess it'll be a while for those developers (and their
software) to retire...  Newer software in this area does tend to use
Python.  I'm not sure if Attila's suggestions of more expressive
languages would ever get into the field, though.

Ray

[1]  http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-2015-top-ten-programming-languages