ielex-data-and-tree VS Biopython

There used to be a website with really excellent Swadesh lists. Unfortunately it's offline now, but you can view its contents on github here: https://github.com/evotext/ielex-data-and-tree

I also like contributing specifically to my field. As a PhD student and possibly future scientist, I have a vested interest in the quality of the software in my field–specifically, structural bioinformatics. I use several tools in this field and often find areas that can be improved, both for myself and others. As an example, consider this minor documentation change I added to the Biopython documentation.

Usearch will do all-against-all comparisons, cluster sequences, and produce alignments for each cluster. You can set the clustering threshold (proportion of residues identical). The alignments are in fasta format, which is pretty standard. If all you want is basic similarity it might be easiest to just write something that calculates normalized Hamming distances (typically called p-distances in the molecular evolution literature) between pairs of sequences. I suspect the biopython fasta reader (you can install biopython from https://biopython.org/) will be good enough.

Yes, the computing tool for biological computation.

Beside that their core lectures to non-computer scientists are public (survey), workshops by software carpentry move around the globe. Maybe your intent to seed hands-on knowledge is in similar tune before heading for biopython, bioperl, bioawk. It doesn't hurt to tap into resources initially written for non-labrats either, e.g. about regular expressions by programming historian.

Well, what language do you want to learn? What is your background so far? Assuming it is more on the side of biology, software carpentry's Python may eventually lead to biopython? Though there equally is a chance for AWK (Hack the planet's text! and bioawk...

I think you mind find something of a community around BioPython, which might be helpful. Just looking at the capabilities will probably be instructive as well.