Posted by
Johan Henriksson-2 on
Dec 25, 2009; 12:40pm
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/Scripting-languages-and-API-tp3689913p3689917.html
> * First, they are quick to develop in. Remember that sometime ago, Python
> was described as a language you could teach yourself in one day. It became
> slightly deeper recently, but the ease of learning and of use are not
> compromised.
> Learning Java is a different thing. For my experience, it is fantastically
> thrilling, but also much more involving. It is a compiled language, and the
> prototyping and debugging processes take much longer and are much subtile
> than in a scripting language.
> There are plenty of differences that make Java and scripting languages
> unique and non-overlapping.
>
> It is then not surprising to meet in biology labs grad-students or even
> undergrads that are pure biologists (and the amount of time it takes is
> enormous and leaves little place to anything else), and completely fluent in
> one of these scripting languages. For instance, because of bioinformatics
> courses, students got to learn Ruby or Python or more. Having them in ImageJ
> is like saying "Hey you are familiar with that, just kick in and start
> developing in ImageJ".
>
I'm putting a lot of faith in beanshell for scripting. it's easy to convert
to proper java (and the reverse) but has the properties of a scripting
language. it has the disadvantage of being a bit java-ish; java is a
notoriously difficult and messy language. I remember our 7 week university
intro programming courses barely touched making interfaces (implementing,
yes, but only for swing). I have no experience of teaching python but one
guy usually taught all of haskell(98) the first lecture.
it's nice to hear that they don't mainly teach perl for bioinformatics where
you come from :P but that's a point to consider, java has otherwise been The
language taught around here (sweden, gothenburg).
/Johan
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Johan Henriksson
PhD student, Karolinska Institutet
http://mahogny.areta.org http://www.endrov.net