On Thu, Oct 12, 2017 at 6:04 AM, Geoffrey Knauth <ge...@knauth.org> wrote: > I enjoyed your talk as well.
Thanks, Geoffrey. > > In my adopted family (cousins), I lost a sister and a brother to cancer. > The sister was a cancer researcher. The topic of your talk is from a > personal point of view very compelling, and it is compelling for many people > I know. I'm sorry for your loss. I hope we'll be able to make a difference in cancer research, although I'm not arrogant enough to think it will be a huge one. > From a scientific point of view, the vision of what you're doing fills a > void. > What you are doing sounds very hard. You are doing things that big storage > companies say they don't want to do. I can't tell if that is brave or > foolish of you, but you didn't seem terribly worried, and that too is > interesting. I think it's less that they don't want to do it because it's technically difficult, but because it's more difficult to monetize. Google could do peer-to-peer networking with local storage if they wanted to, but it's not in their interest. It's much better for them to control your data so that (a) you can't easily move away from them and (b) they can data mine it in order to better target ads at you. We (Biomantica) are not concerned with being a billion dollar company; our goal is to contribute something to the world and make a good living doing it. Eventually James and I will probably exit and use the resulting money to start something else; if you have $5M in the bank then you can live on interest indefinitely, anywhere in the country, meaning that you have infinite runway to work on your next effort without having to take investment or scramble for grants. > Given how much gene sequencing work has been done in Perl in the past, and > given the speed advantage of almost anything besides Perl for very large > data (I have some first-hand experience with large data and Perl from the > 1990s), I think it's great you're using Racket for anything even remotely > related to gene sequencing. Thanks! Perl gets used so much because it's a great language and extremely practical, as well as having excellent and extensive modules in everything including bioinformatics. The people who object to it typically do so on three grounds: (1) it's old, (2) they dislike its use of punctuation, and (3) it's slower than some of the competition. Personally, I think the first two are ridiculous calumnies, but you're right about the third. That's a problem that Racket shares, but it's fast *enough* even if it's not fast overall. Racket is also more powerful than any other language I've worked in, fully staffed in terms of modules, and a pleasure to write. Dave > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
