- Perl. Oh perl how I love thee... let me $count the ways. Perl is loosely typed. Named after Matthew 13:45-46 (so it's God's language). It is a perfect language for all things bioinformatics. I can do so many things so quickly in perl. It's flexible and quick. Here's a line of code from the final exam I gave in my BMI courses to extract data from a microarray file: ($line=~ m/(\w+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)/). Now that's good stuff.
- SQL. Whether you are purist and pronounce it "essquel" or someone who goes with the flow and pronounces it "sequel", SQL is a great language for manipulating databases. I've grown to love this language as I teach it all the time. It's easy to use and just makes sense.
- VBA. Visual Basic for Applications is a programming language you can use to write macros in Excel. This is one of my favorite things ever! Every semester students bring spreadsheets they need help with and I write macros for them to make life easier. Such a fun language.
- HTML. This is such an easy versatile language, what's not to like? In about half an hour I can teach anyone how to program in HTML. It's easy and fun.
- ASP. NET. I love to create websites with database backends. This you can do easily with ASP.NET. I've created several for work and hope to do one soon for PDHC.
- Matlab. I've always loved Matlab. I wish I could work with it more. How else can you do linear algebra so fast! Matlab has a bioinformatics toolbox that we used in the BMI courses and I miss it.
- VB.NET. The .NET platform is leaps and bounds better than VB6. Unfortunately I was too lazy to convert many of my programs to VB.NET so I still have some in VB6. Even so, I love VB.NET
- Java. I wrote my entire genetic algorithm for my research in Java so it should definitely be on the list. While I wrote a lot of classes and all that, I prefer the lazy programming of perl.
- C++. Before Java I used a lot of C++ in my programming courses. It was actually difficult to move from C++ to Java for my research because I was so used to C++. However I've come to like Java more. Still C++ holds a special place in my heart.
- Basic. When I was 10 years old I wrote my first program in Basic and never looked back. It showed me a world of working with computers that I knew I would always enjoy.
What are your favorite programming languages?
2 comments:
I'd have SQL as #1. Other than that, I'm not really sure. I've done at least minimal work with 9 of your 10, having never done anything with Matlab. My Perl experience is limited to a single class in college (before DeVry, at Riverland Community College).
OCaml!! It's a dialect of ML, a functional PL. Very pleasant to use.
Post a Comment