He complains about compilation time, and does not try neither C# nor Java?
The choice of languages for this benchmark is laughable.
The choice of languages for this benchmark is laughable.
I think that for most academic uses, ease of development is really important. Remember, most of these people don't have CS backgrounds, which makes python a good choice because it's easy to learn and doesn't require much setup. It's main drawback is that it's slow, but this doesn't matter in many cases. When I was in grad school, I'd use a small dataset to try to figure out the best algorithm and then if I had to leave my computer running overnight to run on a larger dataset, it usually wasn't a big deal.
On the other hand, sometimes you just need something really fast. In that case, C is your darling.
Java/C# make lots of tradeoffs on both sides, which works well for software developers but not necessarily researchers (who don't have to worry about code being maintainable).
Most biologists I met were far more comfortable in the pissing rain, up the mountain, in the middle of nowhere collecting animal shit than in front of a keyboard.
If there were a Venn diagram of biologists and computer and technology enthusiasts the overlap would need a micrometer to be read.
Disclaimer: Please take this extremely generalized and likely offensive to one of those small few in that tiny overlap I mentioned, statement with a grain of salt. Please don't take this too seriously, it's just from my own narrow sampling of people i've interacted with which is may or may not be representative of the overall population.
Disclaimer: my background has absolutely no overlap with biology/bioinformatics.
AFAIK a lot of chemistry equipment actually is built with Java and C#.
In fact you might encounter some biologists using VB.NET after they outgrown their Excel VBA macros.
Results in clear code, easy implementation, and good performance 95% of the time.