My only Bioinformatics experience is as a user. I’ve TA-ed a course for 4th year Biochemistry students where they learn how to visualize proteins, make phylogenetic trees, sequence logos, alignments, etc. and have to understand how the programs work at a very basic level (eg. what is Hidden Markov Model)

I’d like to learn the other end of the field and want to teach myself a useful programming language. I’ve been leaning towards Python after several people’s input, but I know that Perl is more established in bioinformatics. Would I be able to be of any use if I knew only Python? Would I be behind the times if I knew only Perl? Is either one harder to pick up after knowing only the other?

If you had the choice to learn one of these languages from scratch, which would you pick?

(I feel the same way as when I had the choice between learning to ski or learning to snowboard.)