> Linear-regression estimates show gene name errors in supplementary files have increased at an annual rate of 15 % over the past five years, outpacing the increase in published papers (3.8 % per year).
This still doesn't actually tell us if the problem is getting worse. Or if it does it is badly worded. Even assuming this 3.8% is derived from their own data, you need the number of papers published that contain genelists (I would imagine this has probably risen faster than the number of papers overall).
In other words, the authors should have plotted the error rate over time rather than the number of errors over time.
I think the suggestions is that Perl 6 is a very different beast to Perl 5. Or to put it another way, you could read the title of the post as "Bioinformatics and the joy of Foo Programming Language".
> b) it's an old timer who has never gotten with the times.
As someone who knows the author of the post, that is mostly true ;)
In all seriousness, while I generally agree with your sentiments I don't think that Perl is dead within Bioinformatics. Not least since major data providers, e.g. Ensembl, write their tools in Perl.
On a similar minor note, it would be nice to have exact matches to the 3 letter station codes appear at the top of the list, as they do on 'official' sites.
This is a great site though and potentially very useful, great job!
This still doesn't actually tell us if the problem is getting worse. Or if it does it is badly worded. Even assuming this 3.8% is derived from their own data, you need the number of papers published that contain genelists (I would imagine this has probably risen faster than the number of papers overall).
In other words, the authors should have plotted the error rate over time rather than the number of errors over time.