[BNE-PM] What do you use Perl for?

[Derek Thomson]

Hi Francis,

Francis Clark wrote:
> 
> ok, ok, I'll come out from under my rock.. there's been enough mail over
> the last few days to convince me that there may actually be life out
> there..
> 
> Unfortunately I'm rather busy and stressed trying to finish a thesis at the
> moment, otherwise I'd come along tonight and generally be a more
> enthusiastic perl monger. 

No, that's fine. I'm more than happy to see people just contributing to 
the list!

> However, I'd be interested to know how many other
> silent mongers are hiding behind their terminals out there?
> 
> For my part I'm a computational biologist, and what you might call a basic
> perl user, although I do some reasonablely sophisticated things with my
> unsophisticated perl scripts. 

Apparently, Perl is quite popular in the biological sciences. Did you 
know that there are 2 bioinformatic Perl books?

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/begperlbio/
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bioskills/


> Mostly munging big text files, but also a
> little bit of process management (breaking up course grained jobs to run
> them in parallel and bringing all the results together at the end).

I'd like to hear more about Perl (and computing in general) being used 
in science. Perhaps you can explain it to us at some future get together?

> 
> I suppose my weakness is that I view other peoples code as being a little
> like their toothbrushes - fine for them, but I'm not going to use it
> (especially if it means working out what this object oriented business
> is). 

Yes, that's a fine way to use Perl - to automate a task that only you 
may actually have to do. Don't worry about the object-oriented stuff - 
it's really just a way of separating code into "modules" (or "classes"), 
so that other people can use them (*). To use (say) the Perl XML modules 
you don't necessarily have to understand how it's done ... perhaps I 
should include "using objected oriented modules" in my (hopefully) 
upcoming "advanced Perl" tutorial, and leave the real meat of how to do 
OO in Perl to the propellor heads amongst us.

(*) yes, that's an incomplete explanation, but I'm trying to explain it 
so that a non-gearhead can see the usefulness of a really abstract concept.

> So, although I can write and use my own basic modules, and know that
> there is this thing called CPAN out there (and something called BioPerl
> also), I've never made the time to work out how useful it might be to me.
> Anyone else out there like this?

If so, perhaps we should organize some sort of tutorial or presentation 
to introduce people to the wide world of Perl modules? How to find them, 
install them and use them, plus a quick outline of some of the more 
useful ones (XML, CGI, DBI, ... ?)

Regards,
Derek.