It's an impressive project, but I'm not sure the niche is big enough. It's certainly come a long way since the last time I looked at it!<p>My biggest concern is that Seq sucks users into a sort of local maximum. While piping syntax is nice, and the built-in routines are handy, it's a lot less flexible than a "mainstream" programming language, simply because of the smaller community and relative paucity of libraries. BioPython[1] has been around a long long time, and I think a lot of potential users of Seq would be better suited by using a regular bioinformatics library in the language they know best.<p>e.g: The example of reading Fasta files in Seq:<p><pre><code> # iterate over everything
for r in FASTA('genome.fa'):
print r.name
print r.seq
</code></pre>
versus BioPython:<p><pre><code> from Bio import SeqIO
for r in SeqIO.parse("genome.fa", "fasta"):
print(r.id)
print(r.seq)
</code></pre>
It might be pretty useful as a teaching tool, but I'm skeptical of its long-term benefit to professionals. I'm not sure the ecosystem of Seq users will be large enough, y'know? Again, it's pretty impressive work, and it's come a long way. I wish the devs all the best. :)<p>1. <a href="https://biopython.org/" rel="nofollow">https://biopython.org/</a>