I think its fair to say the most popular programming/scripting language for Bioinformatics is Perl. My language of choice Python would certainly be coming in second. I reallly really don’t like perl, and I think it is a poor language for Science in general, here’s why!
1. Its hard to read
This is the biggest issue for me. Well commented Perl is actually pretty fun to read, its a punchy language so you don’t have to do too much scrolling to work out what is going on. However, the key point of that last comment is the word “comment”, poorly commented Perl scripts are a nightmare to read. And frankly, most of the scripts that I have read fall into this latter category. Turnover of people in Science is pretty high, so the idea using a language that makes it really hard for other people to just pick up where the other person left of is such a silly idea. The other key thing is that Science should be about transparency, and Perls silly syntax just adds another layer dust that hides mistakes and errors in logic. This is latter point is especially important when bioinformaticians are working with biologists who don’t know a computer language, essentially no oversight or review because the language is so god dam hard to understand unless you know the syntax.
Dave the Data Dero 