Proposal for Bio-LOLCode package or IM IN YR GENEZ

Working in bioinformatics, you typically have to deal with people of two different categories; those with a biological background and those from an informatics background. Luckily there are also those that fit in both categories. When it comes to programming, people from the first category generally just want to get the job done as quickly and (often) impossibly hacky as possible, while many people belonging to the later category often have very strong feelings about how programming is done; what language to program in and if it is LINUX or Windows etc. I am no exception to this rule myself, preffering Java and disliking Perl and Windows strongly. This may seem pretty geeky to some of you, but, there are always degrees of geekiness.

For the most geeky of geeks, it is not enough to talk about how Windows sucks and how .NET is Satan's spawn or whetever it may be. The true übergeek instead turns to an unusual esoteric language that very few people use, thus making life harder not only for himself, but also for those around him and this, I suspect, is what he really wants. Typical languages to turn to in this case is Haskell or Darwin. Other people that want to compile the code of the übergeek then has to install the compiler, strange packages and programming libraries for it and other things that may be virtually impossible to find or manage to install. The übergeek smiles as he watches them fail. It has been said that all the Haskell programmers of the world would fit in one Boeing 747. It's also been said that if this Boeing would crash and take the lives of the poor programmers in it, nobody at all would notice.

Anyway, to get to the point, I have realised that to transgress the boundary and become a true übergeek myself, I have to find my own favourite programming language that nobody else has ever heard of and now I think I have found it! The language is called LOLCode and inspired by the pidgin English of LOLCAT pictures, using sloppy chat-style language and geeky snowclones. Its main mission is to rival XML as the Lingua Franca of computers. There's a compiler for Perl and even for .NET. A typical example of a program written in LOLCode would be :

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "O HAI, I HAS LOOP!"
LOL COUNTER R MINIMUM
BTW LOOPING
IM IN YR LOOP
VISIBLE COUNTER
BTW Below is an IF-statement
I HAS A DIFFERENCE
LOL DIFFERENCE R COUNTER NERF DIFFERNCE
YARLY
 KTHXBYE
NOWAI
 I HAS A NEXTCOUNTER

So, for this beautiful language to truly be useful to us bioinformaticians, we need a Bio-package. Every language with any sense of dignity has one and the time has come to LOLCode. To be a little different, I suggest we call it IM IN YR GENEZ. Time to sit down and work on a grant proposal to the Open Bioinformatics Foundation. I will let you know how it goes...

(I PROMIZ LEZ GEEKY POST SOON, DOODZ)