Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I guess such languages, which are defaults in the realm of web development, don't even come up for consideration in the realm of biology?



Trying to get biologists to care about computers is like telling someone to be excited that they need to get all their wisdom teeth pulled and have a cavity filled on the same day. I was pretty much the oddity throughout all my schooling and any of the biologists I met while working that actually knew much of anything about computers and programming beyond what needed to be done to write reports and enter data.

Most biologists I met were far more comfortable in the pissing rain, up the mountain, in the middle of nowhere collecting animal shit than in front of a keyboard.

If there were a Venn diagram of biologists and computer and technology enthusiasts the overlap would need a micrometer to be read.

Disclaimer: Please take this extremely generalized and likely offensive to one of those small few in that tiny overlap I mentioned, statement with a grain of salt. Please don't take this too seriously, it's just from my own narrow sampling of people i've interacted with which is may or may not be representative of the overall population.


You really need to learn more about bioinformaticians’ contributions to computing before making an ignorant and knowingly offensive comment like this.

Disclaimer: my background has absolutely no overlap with biology/bioinformatics.


I know about bioinformatics and the contributions of biology to computer science and vice versa. I've personally worked in both field sampling and data analysis. My overly offensive generalized statement was a light jab towards field biologists i've known, including my own friends who i've debated on this subject with, who tend to dislike computers and will go as far to avoid even excel and hand write their data while doing all math on a calculator. It really wasn't meant to be taken seriously and I suppose would go above the head of those who haven't spent a lot of time in the field with biologists.


Okay, sorry about the misinterpretation, but it should have been clear to you that ggp was referring to computational biologists or bioinformaticians, making your observations rather unrelated.


Bioinformaticians use Python,R,Java,Julia,Groovy,Js and more (I use kotlin and python mostly but that's in a niche of bioinformatics I don't touch genes nor proteins)... Same as in software dev, there are a lot of beliefs. So you have the club of the js people that hate java, the club of pythoners that hate R, and people that just use what allow them to solve their problem and they are the ones that achieve the most but also that you hear about the less.


Sure they are, life sciences companies use tons of Java and .NET.

In fact you might encounter some biologists using VB.NET after they outgrown their Excel VBA macros.


And that is the problem. I understand Julia and Python there. I'd understand Haskell (as every biologist is a mathematician too). But to list JS and Lua, and not have C# and Java?

AFAIK a lot of chemistry equipment actually is built with Java and C#.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: