Comments on: On the scripting skills

By: Alexei Drummond

Alexei Drummond — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 23:56:33 +0000

At the University of Auckland we have an undergraduate degree program in Bioinformatics. Our students learn computer science, biology and statistics/maths all to final year… They are the next generation of biologists, if I have my say. But even so — at the end of the day its the science that matters, not the programming — so the better and more productive the software tools are the less fiddling around all of us will have to do, and the more we can focus on the scientific questions!

By: freesci

freesci — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 17:41:05 +0000

Thanks Deepak,

You made an interesting point in your post that a formal training would be beneficial for bioinformatics-turned biologists (like myself). I’d love to hear that couple of years ago when I thought that O’Reilly’s perl cookbook is enough to learn programming.

I didn’t want to point to the specific examples, but I usually find one, two papers per month (only in my small field) that clearly show that there was no-one around able to run sequence search and understand its results. Unfortunately, these papers get published and mistakes are propagating…

By: Deepak

Deepak — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 17:07:53 +0000

These are very much in line with my own thoughts. It’s a question of priorities. A knowledge of statistical methods, tools, and being able to use those tools properly is a higher priority IMHO.