Biologists At The Computer

You know the black screen that lives behind Windows? The one that only has that old school font and limited mouse-clickability? Well, it turns out you can do stuff there!

And you know how there's crazy ass strings of numbers and letters and symbols and various kinds of parantheses? Guess what: those have meanings!

I know, I know. The mind reels. At least, the mind of the hapless programming-illiterate biologist reels. There's a whole 'nother language, comprised of co-opted English words as well as totally gibberish made-up words, spoken by the elves who live in the computer. It is not intuitive. It has many variations.

There are secret runic operations and strange dances that you have to do to even get into that weird world of white-on-black. Once inside, numbers and letters are not segregated into happy little boxes; they squeeze together with no respect for intervening punctuation marks or the poor biologist's symbol-vertigo (the kind that strikes when she looks at tax forms). Sometimes spaces mean spaces, plus signs mean plusses - sometimes not. Sometimes curly brackets are called for, other times square brackets are the way forward. Dollar signs grow like dandelions and their meaning seems to be context-dependent. Who knew keyboard symbols could have different conjugations?

I am trying to jump into this world after missing the first two sections. The instructor may as well be speaking ancient Aramaic. Slowly, slowly, Leonid . . . and go easy on the pronouncing of the acronyms as words, please.

On Friday we are supposed to learn PERL. I have a feeling this has nothing to do with knitting.