I agree with a lot of your points. My point about Perl is that there are not enough apps. Python has continued to add medical space stuff. Perl has the UMLS stuff and BioPerl but the former is difficult to install, takes up a lot of disk, and requires external licensing steps and the latter was, the last time I looked in semi-functional disarray as, like you mentioned, it's a hodgepodge to account for hodgepodges. I despise Word but LaTeX is terribly hard to use if your project doesn’t conform exactly to an existing package and a non-programmer would have almost zero chance of getting a project done with it in such case. I don’t think we need indoctrination. We need good, easy to use, tools. When programmers have a problem to solve they reach for the most feature complete, robust, and dev friendly tool.

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