[Bioperl-l] Implementing Bioperl6 for GSoC 2012

[Bart Wiegmans]

Hello all BioPerl-ers,

This is my first e-mail to the list and thus my introduction. My name
is Bart Wiegmans, I study biology at the University of Groningen, the
netherlands. It is my goal to implement bioperl6 this summer as part
of the GSoC program.

Why would I want such a thing? For a start, I'd like to learn more
about bioinformatics. As I told you I study biology, so this has an
obvious advantage for me. Also, I'd like to learn perl6 well, and this
is only possible when one writes a significant program in it.
Moreover, I think perl6 is awesome, and having a real-world toolkit
like bioperl out there might just be enough to develop a significant
community using it. As a third, I think perl5's object support is
crufty, and difficult to learn for many people. These people include
biologists who might not be inclined to learn it, and rather use some
other tools instead.

As to who I am, I already told you my name. I am 24 years old, and
study biology at an undergraduate level. (For those interested, yes
this means I haven't exactly been flying through my courses :-)). I
have been programming computers ever since I was 16 years old, and
earlier if you count BASIC. Starting out with C, most of that has been
websites (in PHP), scripts (in Perl), and other smallish programs (in
Java / Perl). For example, I implemented a parser and decoder for the
dirac video specification as part of GSoC 2008, and a script which
reads the NIH bookshelf website and translates this into ePub e-books.
Read quite a few of them that way.

Aside from my motivation and capabilities, two other factors somewhat
complicate my involvement with GSoC. The first is that the academic
year ends halfway in July in the netherlands, not in may as in the USA
and in many other countries. This means that I am not 'free' in a real
sense before that time. Also, I have a day job as a PHP programmer for
a local online students' magazine, which also takes some time. Which
is unfortunate, because I'd rather spend my time writing useful
programs; hence, if you would accept me as a student I plan to take
leave from this job during the period of GSoC.

Anyway, I realize this has been enough information for any interested
reader. If there is any interest on your side, I frequent freenode
under the nickname brrt. Other than that and this e-mail address, I
don't have much of an online presence.

Kind regards,
Bart Wiegmans