Clojure or Scala for bioinformatics/biostatistics/medical research [closed]

Answer 1

I have some experience in Scala and only little knowledge in Clojure, but I programmed Lisp many years ago.

Lisp is a beautiful language, but it never made it to the world, because it was too limited. I believe you need a statically-typed language to develop robust systems. The type system in Scala is not difficult to master to benefit from it. If you want to do very advanced things with it to make your libraries idiot-proof, you can, but then you will need to study the type system a little more.

Scala favours immutable types, but you can use mutables without any problem, which you sometimes do need. Concurrency in Scala is very well implemented and frameworks like akka extend and enhance these possibilities.

Scala stands a better chance to become a mainstream language since it's a fuller language. I'm afraid that Clojure is too much like Lisp (but reimplemented on the JVM). I liked Lisp a lot, but it had too many disadvantages for real-life programs. With Scala I think we have the best of both worlds (OO and functional) in a clean marriage. On top of that, Scala seems to really catch on in the market.

Answer 2

If you like R, give Incanter a try! It's R for Clojure.

Scala's is geared toward being syntactically easy for people coming from Java, which was intended to be syntactically easy for people coming from C though with two levels of indirection like this the advantage may be lost.

Clojure is getting a lot of traction in the Big Data space and maps very well onto Hadoop jobs for Huge Data. I think this would be a big advantage in the bioinformatics world.

Really, these things are largely personal taste so try both and see that makes you happy :)

If you are looking to get a feel for Clojure without a lot of "intellectual overhead" may I suggest using leiningen to get a test project started quickly?

Answer 3

You have to ask yourself how important functional programming is for you. You know C++ so you probably know OO. I would say it's easier to do FP in Clojure (because you can't really drop back to OO-style) in Scala you will probebly end up dropping FP and do more OO style.

I can't really say anything about your application space.

Since you mentioned R, there is an R-like Clojure library for statistics called Incanter. I don't know about other existing projects in your application space.

There is a lot of information about both languages, so that should not be a problem. The learning curve is kind of steep with both languages. Clojure is a much smaller language and since you already know some lisp it should not be to hard to learn the important stuff. Scala has a type system that will be hard to pick up especially since your main experience is with C/C++.

Both languages have great concurrency models and you will probably be happy with both.