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in reply to Other Bioinformatics Monks Out There?

I'm an MS candidate in Bioinformatics working on evolutionary algorithms and their applications in cancer classification, hopefully I'll finish my thesis and move on to a PhD program.

I use Perl on a daily basis to hack out scripts and to quickly ask questions about the datasets that I deal with. BioPerl is central to a lot of the work that I'm doing, as it makes tying a lot of Perl programs together very easy. However, every now and then I find it a bit lacking. For example, I'm currently doing a bit of work on RNA editing and trans-splicing, and I'm writing some custom objects that trans-splice and assemble sequences from trans-spliced FeatureTable definitions.

I'm also employed as a sysadmin, and I find Perl invaluable for writing Nagios plugins, database updating scripts and testing suites for various services. Perl is just a good way to get all sorts of computer-related things done.