Hi Dave,
Dave Tang wrote:
explain to me the answer. My motivation for this question is primarily due to interest and if someday someone asks me how is Perl good for biology (most biological data is stored as flat files).
As others have said, it is perhaps because Perl got into it first that makes it "good for biology". If someone asks you, it's perhaps better to give them a list of options and ask them to choose.
There are a fair number of people around me using Ruby and even fewer using Python. If I have to generalize these people, it seems that the people who have done bioinformatics for a long time are using Perl because that was the only choice then and there is no real reason to change. Newer people seem to go with any of these 3 languages (Ruby is of course more popular in Japan).
I also noticed recently that R is starting to support biological data better through bioconductor. This includes querying databases, etc. So, though not a scripting language, it may be a viable alternative to some...
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