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> Biology is completely different from Computer Science and metaphors between the fields build no understanding and can only be misleading, every time I hear so
by ramsaysnuuhh 13y ago
> Biology is completely different from Computer Science and metaphors between the fields build no understanding and can only be misleading, every time I hear someone comparing DNA to a computer program I fall into pieces.
That's the kind of attitude that pushes competent programmers away from bioinformatics. End result? Almost all bioinformatics software is a steaming pile of crap.
- mtdewcmu 13y agoThe problem is probably that you have to train in two separate fields to be competent in computer science and biology, and that's not going to be common.
- ramsaysnuuhh 13y agoBut the quality and sophistication of software in, say, astronomy makes bioinformatics software look like it was written by 14 year old spammers in the former soviet bloc. The real problem is that biology went from being essentially a liberal art, more like history or sociology than a science, to an extremely quantitative field in only a few academic generations. You can get a PhD in Molecular & Cell Biology from Berkeley without ever having taken a statistics, linear algebra, multivar calc, or CS course. Biologists need programmers more than the other way around, so they should start by taking a few courses with actual numbers and stuff and learn the bare basics first.
- nl 13y agobioinformatics software look like it was written by 14 year old spammers in the former soviet bloc So it's pretty damn good code, then? (Having worked with plenty of coders from the former soviet bloc: they have a pretty low tolerance of crap code)