[Haskell-cafe] Why are OCaml and Haskell being used at these companies?

[Ketil Malde]

Seth Gordon <sethg at ropine.com> writes:

>> Bioinformaticians are among the first to adopt functional
>> programming languages

>From my experience, Bioinformatics use a mixture of langauges - C to
implement various algorithms, a bit of Java for UI-oriented stuff, and
Perl to tie it all together.  (You can use Python instead, of
course, but expect to be considered something of a rebel.)

I think Haskell works nicely to combine at least the C and Perl
aspects, but as far as I can tell, I'm about the only one who does
this. 

There isn't a lot of comp.sci. in bioinformatics, beyond a handful of
relatively standard algorithms.  I guess it's one of those "practical"
fields.  I guess the important difference to the financial sector is
that the competitive advantage is in exclusive data, not exclusive
algorithms or analytical methods.  Thus, programmer productivity isn't
quite so important, you're just going to script togehter some
pre-packaged tools, often ten or fifteen year old software.

> FWIW, a few years ago, when I was stubbornly unemployed[*], I wrangled
> a fifteen-minute informational interview with Kenan Sahin[**].  He
> advised me to look for work related to medical devices

Sounds like good advice to me - pharmaceuticals seem to have enough
money, at least.

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants