Malay wrote:
> Dear Gurus:
>> I am a Ph.D. student in Molecular Biology and have a plan to persue a career
> in Bioinformatics. I have a strong background in Javascript/html and I am
> quite comfortable with C and Perl. I want to learn a "real programming
> language" and not being able to choose between Java and C++. On one hand
> Java has the advantage of being platform-independent and writing a GUI based
> program in Java is very easy. On the flip side Java is extremely slow and
> migration into system level programming is almost impossible. On the other
> hand, C++ will be an eternal language and particularly with increasing
> popularity of Linux will be an important language in the days to come and
> writing elementary GUI with platform independent toolkits like wxWindows are
> not very difficult.
I'll suggest to use both.
C/C++ for the algorithmics, so you get speed and also portability, at this
level,
Java for interfaces and networks, so you can easy deal with such things, in a
portable way.
I'm not inside bionformatics... just informatic, but I think that would be a
god choice (of course you can use both togehther).
If you think it's a problem larning both,
then think that for fast algorithms you will probably use C++ just as C alone,
and using Java will not bother you with learning some platform-specific
toolkit, so I think finally you'll save time.
Of course I'm tolking of "real" programming, probably there are some easier
solutions around.
Andrea
