[Biojava-l] BioInformatics toolbox.

[Michael L. Heuer]

On Tue, 9 Apr 2002, Mario Gianota wrote:

> Michael Heuer wrote:
>
> > The biojava library, javadocs, and example code integrate well into any of
> > a number of java IDEs -- netbeans, forte, codewarrior, jde, jbuilder &c.
> > as is.
>
> Yes, but these tools are still too complicated for biologists to use. As
> programmers we take a good deal of what we know for granted and cannot
> afford to assume that the concepts we have in our heads have a corresponding
> approximation in the head of the average biologist because the biologists
> frequently haven't got the first idea of what we're talking about.
>
> I suppose the correct phrase would be biology-centric for an IDE that is
> wholly devoted to Biologists. No specialized programming knowledge required.
> Such an IDE would have an emphasis on point & click, dragging, mouse
> gestures and so on and would deliberately go out of its way to hide the
> programming side of things and provide most of its functionality with visual
> metaphors.

Please be careful about generalizations here -- I'm a biologist, and I bet
that most primary authors of code in all openbio projects would also
consider themselves biologists or chemists first, and programmers second.

I just spend more time programming than pipetting.

   michael