Ruby and Bioinformatics in China

abzona

Does anyone in this forum know what scripting language is most popular in China's bioinformatics community?  Is it Ruby or Python or Perl?

I am starting up a bioinformatics company in Shanghai or perhaps one of its nearby cities, and will use Ruby as the main daily working language.  I was looking for Ruby programmers, and had no luck so far.  Perhaps I was looking in wrong places.  I wounder if anyone in this forum can enlighten me with the following: (1) which population among Perl, Python and Ruby communities is larger in China, (2) what percentage of biologists know about scripting (e.g. shell, Perl, Python, Ruby, R, awk).

I am interested in hiring Ruby programmers with very strong Linux background (Linxu + Ruby are absolute requirements).  They are expected to have some biology background or had experience in dealing with biological data (e.g. DNA, protein, microarray data).  Web and database skills are required.  Strong math and statistics knowledge is desired as well, but optional.  Please feel free to contact me in Chinese or English (I'm very slow in inputing Chinese) if you are a good Ruby or Python programmer with a lot of Linux and web experience, and are interested in bioinformatics and a position in / near Shanghai.

Contact: abzona@gmail.com in English or Chinese

[ 本帖最后由 abzona 于 2008-5-13 23:12 编辑 ]

Sapien

Well, as a graduate student majoring in computational biology, I'd like to say that it doesn't make great difference whether using Perl or Python. All popular programming languages are being used  by computational biologists, e.g. C/C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Shell, MATLAB, R. It depends on what kind of work it is and your skills of the languages. For example, Perl is preferred by those dealing with sequence data, while MATLAB is more suitable for image process tasks. And it's not uncommon that one uses several programming languages at the same time.

Personally, I've used Perl for sequence analysis for more than 2 years. But now I'm using MATLAB  most time.

zuerrong

There are both bioperl and bioruby in the real world, they all are the right tools for your working field IMO.
I know some students in Chinese university who have been using perl for the work, but for ruby, I didn't meet yet.

2gua

这方面，用Perl吧，实话实说，理性地说。

Monox

回复 1# abzona

In BGI, we mainly use Perl for data manipulating, and pipeline development. We use R for graphics generating. Shell and awk and other Linux tools and just utilities we use frequently in our daily life.
    A few people use Python instead of Perl for data manipulating but as far as I know, only I'm trying to use Ruby for data manipulating. I was mainly using Perl for that task.
    For efficiency enforced software development, there's a core development team mainly use C/C++. And for web development, Java is used instead.