[fwip]

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!

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.

e.g: The example of reading Fasta files in Seq:

    # iterate over everything
    for r in FASTA('genome.fa'):
        print r.name
        print r.seq

versus BioPython:

    from Bio import SeqIO
    for r in SeqIO.parse("genome.fa", "fasta"):
        print(r.id)
        print(r.seq)

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. :)

1. https://biopython.org/

[chmaynard]

> It's an impressive project, but I'm not sure the niche is big enough.

Big enough for what? Instead of a gratuitous critique of its "benefit to professionals", maybe you could comment on the project's design choices and implementation. That would be more useful to us amateurs.