We Still Have an Abacus Here

Thomas Mailund rounds up and adds to the discussion of whether biologists should learn how to program. Earlier in the week, John Hawks wondered if a new program from Wolfram, Alpha, eventually will make bioinformatics obsolete and replace the work of many of today's graduate students, leading him to ask what today's graduate students should be learning. Daniel MacArthur responds that such tools lag behind the science and so if a young scientist wants to be at the cutting edge, knowing informatics is a must and it'll help that scientist learn "how to think about large-scale biological data." Mailund concurs, adding, "Just because we now have very powerful calculators doesn't mean that it is a waste of time to study math."