Prologue Advent of Code 2019 is an annual competition, in the vein of advent calendars, in which every day a new code challenge is unlocked. This year I’ll be taking AoC as an excuse to learn the basics of two new programming languages – Rust and Julia. Both have been seeing increasing usage in bioinformatics-land and I’ve been meaning to get my feet wet with them.
AoC is a great opportunity to do this since the challenges start small and build their way up.
Bioinformatics ♥ *nix Much of bioinformatics happens on the command line, a text-based system for interacting with files, running commands and writing programs. The command line can feel scary foe newcomers, you are likely used to the Window-Icon-Pointer-Mouse (WIMP) interface of most operating systems (like Windows or MacOS). In WIMP, you use a mouse to move a pointer around the screen, clicking on and interacting with windows and icons as your work.