What is Perl?

Perl is a Programming Language

Written by Larry Wall in late 80's to process mail on Unix systems and since extended by a huge cast of characters. The name is said to stand for:

1. Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister
2. Practical Extraction and Report Language

Perl Properties

1. Interpreted Language
2. "Object-Oriented"
3. Cross-platform
4. Forgiving
5. Great for text
6. Extensible, rich set of libraries
7. Popular for web pages
8. Extremely popular for bioinformatics

Other Languages Used in Bioinformatics

C, C++

Compiled languages, hence very fast.

Used for computation (BLAST, FASTA, Phred, Phrap, ClustalW)

Not very forgiving.

Java

Interpreted, fully object-oriented language.

Built into web browsers.

Supposed to be cross-platform, but not quite yet.

Python

Interpreted, fully object-oriented language.

Rich set of libraries.

Elegant syntax.

Smaller user community than Java or Perl.

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