Nicholas Dickens, The Institute of Cancer Research
21 August 2009
Generally I think this article is really good and anything that encourages more biologists into programming should be welcomed. However, the complexity of the Perl code example on p3. has been unnecessarily exaggerated. The same result as the Ruby code can be achieved with the simpler code:
open INFILE, "my_file.txt"; while(<INFILE>){ chomp(); print reverse($_)."\n"; } close INFILE;
Granted this is still longer than the Ruby code, but this should have been identified by the reviewers.
Obfuscating Perl Code
21 August 2009
Generally I think this article is really good and anything that encourages more biologists into programming should be welcomed. However, the complexity of the Perl code example on p3. has been unnecessarily exaggerated. The same result as the Ruby code can be achieved with the simpler code:
open INFILE, "my_file.txt";
while(<INFILE>){
chomp();
print reverse($_)."\n";
}
close INFILE;
Granted this is still longer than the Ruby code, but this should have been identified by the reviewers.
Competing interests
No competing interests to declare.