{"id":29,"date":"2015-12-18T17:55:26","date_gmt":"2015-12-18T17:55:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/datapunk.net\/opus23blog\/?p=29"},"modified":"2015-12-24T13:31:45","modified_gmt":"2015-12-24T13:31:45","slug":"pearl-of-an-idea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/datapunk.net\/opus23blog\/2015\/12\/18\/pearl-of-an-idea\/","title":{"rendered":"Pearl of an idea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like most of my coding projects Opus 23 Pro is written primarily in the Perl scripting language. Perl handles most of the basic server-side functions (like disk reading, etc) and sends its output out to the browser via HTML, Javascript, etc.<\/p>\n

Perl is widely used in bioinformatics, and has been nicknamed “the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages” because of its flexibility and power, and has also referred to as the “duct tape that holds the Internet together.” The Perl language borrows features from other programming languages, most significantly C++. It has powerful and unsurpassed text processing facilities, one of the reasons it saw major use during the development of the Human Genome project.<\/p>\n

Why, despite the protestations of my daughter that I should move to Python, I continue to code in Perl:<\/p>\n