I will continue on the ML point and rhetorically ask if Bioperl (bioperl home here) was a good project, what its state is today and why.

I say that it was a great project with a lot of effort put by hardened hackers in dealing with frivolus, newbie-like-carelessness-approaching-criminality, narcissistic, life-science rectors' mess quite effectively: they created lots and lots of databases and sites to scrape, different formats, and a lot of overlapping or contradicting naming conventions. Bioperl did a good job at trying to work in this mess.

Now, where is all that effort and effect put in Bioperl gone? Newcomers to bio-informatics, e.g. graduate students, prefer R which does an excellent job with Statistics but it is not R's forte to scrape, download, parse / regex / string manipulation/comparison etc. Something that it was and is Perl's niche. (Notice that most bio-questions asked here have to do with huge string comparisons, the genes). When they find R usage beyond the basics impenetrable to fathom (which is quite true) they (instinctively?) turn to python. Probably because it is the only thing they know from University or from gloglo. And that needs to be fixed in order for Perl to gain the popularity it deserves.

On the other hand, and semi-jokingly, I would say Perl's future's woes are nothing compared to Latex's which is a super-duper typesetting system which so many of these people (doing Nature publications, working at Nasa, talking to BBC on Science subjects) snob for the sake of an idiotic, substandard, buggy and most of all a sworn enemy to aesthetics and scholar-ship: word (<-- this is a lower case word btw, i am not pin-pointing something else).

Marketing is number one I am afraid (i say and excuse my cynicism, some more's coming...). Sponsoring these big heads with material things is key in order to indoctrinate their students and point them towards Perl - look how a book is adopted for a course in most universities and how that makes the author rich and famous in a day.

On the good side, on a recent trip to a remote place where Capitalism is still controlled by strong State (not far east), a student there told me that their professor banned them using python.

In reply to Re^2: The Future of Perl 5 by bliako
in thread The Future of Perl 5 by Laurent_R

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