[BioEdu] Lanuages and environments

[Kevin Karplus]

While it is true that most bioinformaticians are tolerant of various
language choices, there are good reasons to standardize on a small set
of languages within any research group or institution---maintenance of
code written in "unusual" languages is a major headache.  I have a few
TCL scripts written by a former student that cause more maintenance
problems than 100x as many lines of perl code---even though the TCL is
well written and much of the perl is not.  The problem is that no one
else here uses TCL, so making even trivial changes is a major
undertaking. 

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Kevin Karplus 	karplus at soe.ucsc.edu	http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
Professor of Biomolecular Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
(Senior member, IEEE)	(Board of Directors & Chair of Education Committee, ISCB)
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
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