title: An Open-Source Sandbox for Increasing the Accessibility of Functional Programming to the Bioinformatics and Scientific Communities.
abstract: Scientists are continually faced with the need to express complex mathematical notions in code. The renaissance of functional languages such as LISP and Haskell is often credited to their ability to implement complex data operations and mathematical constructs in an expressive and natural idiom. The slow adoption of functional computing in the scientific community does not, however, reflect the congeniality of these fields. Unfortunately, the learning curve for adoption of functional programming techniques is steeper than that for more traditional languages in the scientific community, such as Python and Java, and this is partially due to the relative sparseness of available learning resources. To fill this gap, we demonstrate and provide applied, scientifically substantial examples of functional programming, We present a multi-language source-code repository for software integration and algorithm development, which generally focuses on the fields of machine learning, data processing, bioinformatics. We encourage scientists who are interested in learning the basics of functional programming to adopt, reuse, and learn from these examples. The source code is available at: https://github.com/CONNJUR/CONNJUR-Sandbox (see also http://www.connjur.org).
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbial, Molecular and Structural Biology, University of Connecticut Health Center, 263 Farmington Avenue Farmington, Connecticut 06030.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Fenwick
authors.affiliation: School of Life Sciences, University of Nevada Las Vegas, 4505 Maryland Pkwy., Las Vegas 89154-4004.
authors.forename: Colbert
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sesanker
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science/Information Technology, Western New England University, Springfield, Massachusetts.
authors.forename: Martin R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Schiller
authors.forename: Heidi Jc
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Ellis
authors.forename: M Lee
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Hinman
authors.forename: Jay
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Vyas
authors.forename: Michael R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Gryk
keywords: Clojure; Haskell; Java; LISP; NMR; bioinformatics; component; functional-programming