Perl Saved the Human Genome Project (1996)
Two things from the post stand out to me today:> 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.Indeed!  I still think in terms of PCRE (Perl-compatible regular expressions), and I love that Perl makes regexes a first-class citizen.> 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.This is still true!  One common format (arguably the most common format) for sending around bits of sequenced DNA is the FASTQ format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format).  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.