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Are Bioinformaticians all cool players?
… life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows.
― Stefan Zweig: Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman
I was troubleshooting another day, steering at the screen in red eyes. Behind my screen, a cross-legged frog craft was religiously displayed there, because there is a popular saying goes that frogs can eat bugs. Although it is not clear if the blessed stuff can eat all bugs from Java, C++, Perl, Ruby, Python, R, and Unix etc., there is one thing for certain. Nowadays, bioinformaticians are playing cool with drinking the coffee (Java), wearing blood-red gemstone (Ruby), mastering the snaking charming (Python) and hanging out with camel (Perl) etc..
The past decades have seen a dramatic growing in the technologies and skills. There is emerging a group of researchers swimming in interdisciplinary subjects and surfing the leading waves. If the concepts of big data and cloud computing have become not fashioned any more, there are always the chances in augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), or even Meta, and bitcoins, etc. It is smart to satisfy with the editor’s taste publishing fashioned research, such as combining the trend topics with Covid-19 and machine learning. However, was it worth? Life never gives anything for nothing, and that a price is always exacted for what fate bestows. Same to bioinformatics studies, a new language, new tool, or new method are all at the cost of tons of troubleshooting time. As an old proverb goes sharpening your axe will not delay your job of chopping wood. As a bioinformatician, I will truly appreciate those authors who have the abilities to play cool but not pursue the trend. They silently focused their work to facilitate future users to save the pains of installing dependencies and debugging among tools, such Conda, Snakemake, Docker container/image, and Nextflow, etc. It might be not fair for the frog craft to eat less, but next time I believe my eyes can be more practical on it.
<Xi Zhang, PhD Postdoctoral Fellow, Archibald Lab, Dalhousie University>
<Last updated by Xi Zhang on Feb 16th,2022>