I want to learn one of them but i dont know which to choose. it seems perl is the easiest and i had already know some of them, but how about the others?
If you are well versed with one, you can do almost ALL that you need to do with it. I have been using Perl for a while and haven't come across a single thing that is do-able in Java/ruby/R but not in Perl. There are hacks available for everything and Perl has the most comprehensive libraries compared to others. Besides, it is easy to use. So go ahead.
please take me as a beginner, who was pushed into this field in a hurry. his background is chemistry, IT, and proteomics. this guy was pressed to do something to establish himself. he was willing to do anything and go anywhere, but his only question is what and where.
Jens has beautifully and precisely answered when to use what.
But again, if you want to be good at bioinfo for daily work, do it with Perl for its fast learning curve and ease of file handling etc. You can be up and ready with a dirty little script that does the work. If u want elegance and have time at leisure, go for whatever language except perl.
Plz note: (1) You can write elegant code in Perl too. (2) perl is slower than C as much as 30 times-so no algo/software development in Perl
thanks Jens and Amit, Java may be the best choice for any reason. C is a little horrible.
So i should invest some time on Java, but anyway Perl is already in my mind. I had been use it for data retrieval from a small database a our lab, it's very simple and useful.
I feel like scientists are moving away from perl because of its messiness. It's fine if you're doing relatively simple scripting. Both perl and python are very easy to pick up.
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