Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)
Two things from the post stand out to me today:<p>> Perl is remarkably good for slicing, dicing, twisting, wringing, smoothing, summarizing and otherwise mangling text. … Perl's powerful regular expression matching and string manipulation operators simplify this job in a way unequalled by any other modern language.<p>Indeed!  I still think in terms of PCRE (Perl-compatible regular expressions), and I love that Perl makes regexes a first-class citizen.<p>> Although the biological sciences do involve a good deal of numeric analysis now, most of the primary data is still text: clone names, annotations, comments, bibliographic references. Even DNA sequences are textlike. Interconverting incompatible data formats is a matter of text mangling combined with some creative guesswork.<p>This is still true!  One common format (arguably the most common format) for sending around bits of sequenced DNA is the FASTQ format (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format</a>).  FASTQ files are (ASCII) plain text, making them really easy to parse.  Of course one byte per letter of DNA is wasteful, so FASTQ files are commonly exchanged GZIP-compressed, with the .fastq.gz extension.  Many platforms & tools read in or write out .fastq.gz automatically, saving you the (de)compression step.