---
author: einar
comments: true
date: 2006-07-28 17:44:40+00:00
layout: post
slug: perspectives
title: Perspectives
wordpress_id: 95
categories:
- Science
---

Our paper's completion has probably been delayed till September or so pending some (in my opinion puzzling) organizational issues within a group that works with us. My research work is also pending due to the fact that I'm waiting for someone to prepare a "data matrix" for me, and the person doesn't seem to know that leaving other people hanging is somewhat impolite.

So, I decided that as a person that works in bioinformatics I could learn something new. That is why I've decided to learn [Python](http://www.python.org). The fact that it forces you to use proper indentation and its syntax seems ideal for me, who has little programming experience save bash shell scripting and a few PHP (terrible). I've found a nice [tutorial](http://honors.montana.edu/~jjc/easytut/easytut/) for it and so far it's going OK.

I've taken a look at the [Biopython](http://biopython.org) project as a reference for future work, but it mostly deals with sequence analysis, which is not my field. I wonder if there are Python tools for microarray data analysis, because I really don't like R (it's slow and it's more of an environment than a programming language) and the only ones I know are from the [Bioconductor](http://www.bioconductor.org) project, in R, as I wrote. Not only that, but I work on proprietary high density oligonucleotide arrays, not the most common two-color (Cy3 + Cy5) variants.

If that's not the case, I could look into annotation, probably, which is something I do extensively to filter out biologically non relevant data (always a problem when you deal with complex algorithms).  Still, there's more time before I get to doing something relevant to my work, so the chances are that I'll find something by then.
