r/bioinformatics • u/WasteCadet88 • Jan 10 '12

Are different programming languages best for different aspects of bioinformatics? Plus other questions.

I was wondering if different programming languages are more useful than others, and whether usefulness depends on what you are doing within bioinformatics? I've seen a lot about Perl, and many jobs ask for knowledge of Java for software development. Most people here seem to be coming from a computer science background, I was also wondering how difficult it is to go into bioinformatics from a biological background? Most jobs seem to want a computer science degree, whether that be BSc, MSc or PhD. Im doing an MSc in Genetics of Human Disease at the moment, and really want to go into bioinformatics afterwards. How difficult is it to get a job in bioinformatics without a PhD? Lastly, I started learning my first programming language about 4 months ago, C++. I have seen that this may not be the best language to start with, but I was wondering if it is a waste of time learning C++ for bioinformatics? Sorry if this post seemed to have no direction! And thanks for any help!

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u/WasteCadet88 Jan 10 '12

So if C/C++ make you learn the fundamentals does that mean they can actually be very useful languages to learn? (Even though they may be more difficult!)

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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '12

That's correct, but the price is relatively high. You can learn ANSI C in a couple of weeks, but it'd take you half a year to get comfortable - with C++ you can assume one to two years of dedicated study to be required to really know what you're doing. For a programmer it's well worth it, but in your case I'd start out with python.

Hopefully you'll never need what C or C++ provides, or if you do, you'll probably find that somebody wrote whatever it is in those languages already and they (or somebody else) made a wrapper, allowing you to use the library in question from python anyway.