Best programming language for biology students?

[Chris Jones]

In article <3mc8pq$ha4 at insosf1.infonet.net> mahaffy at dordt.edu (James Mahaffy) writes:
> Can you give me a feel for what is the computer language that
> most biology graduate students program in?   When I was in grad school in

Well, my experience as a programmer is that object-oriented
programming languages are the way to go:  Although it takes slightly
longer to write code in an OOP language, and although the compiled
code will run slightly slower, debugging time is enormously reduced.
If you're doing a big project, debugging is where you're going to
spend a lot of your time.  So I would generally recommend to go for
C++.  C++ code can be compiled on just about anything, especially if
you're willing to try out gcc.  And for most of the computational
biology projects that I've seen, objects are a very convenient way to
think about what you're doing.

Anyone else?
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************************jones at fubar.cs.montana.edu************************
* Chris  | "Nobody likes brain alteration!"                              *
*  Jones |                           --Peri Brown, _Doctor Who_          *
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