Bioinformatics: Perl and BioPerl

Bioinformatics: Perl and BioPerl

As you all know, Bioinformaticians are 2 types:

1- That use ready softwares to analyse biological data.

2- That design new softwares for them or for other Bioinformaticians.

As we discussed on earlier post about The best programming language for bioinformatics HERE, we said that Perl (Practical Extraction an Report Language) is the most powerful because:

1- It is installed or included in almost every Linux distribution.

2- The scripts written by Perl doesn't require compilation (They are portable from one system to another).

3- It supports regular expressions (a very powerful controle and manipulation of strings).

4- And what makes it very unique programming language comparing to others, its support to Hashes or Table Hashes (association of values with keys).

5- It contains an unlimited number of ready modules on internet that anybody can use.

6- It is available also for Windows.

You can read this post about the best book to begin programming with Perl for bioinformatics called Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics.

What is BioPerl?

BioPerl is a project developed by Open Bioinformatics Foundation and is a collection of modules that you can use to easily contruct Perl scripts to automate tasks for bioinformatics.

With BioPerl you don't have to do anything from scratch, so you use ready modules that suites your needs (what do you want more than that???).

In my opinion i see that Perl is the best programming language for bioinformatics, if you have a different point of view, you can suggest it in comments.