How Lisp is designing Nanotechnology (with Prof. Christian Schafmeister)

One of our oldest languages meets one of our newest sciences in this episode, as we talk with Professor Christian Schafmeister, an award-winning nanotech researcher who's been developing a language and a design suite to help research the future molecular machines.

In this episode Christian gives us a quick chemistry lesson to explain what his research is trying to achieve, then we get into the software that's doing it: A new flavour of Common Lisp. But why Lisp? What advantages does a 60 year old language design offer? How does he strike a balance between high-level language features and the need for exceptional performance and parallelism?  And what tricks does his development environment have that modern IDEs could still learn a thing or two from?

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Clasp (the Lisp): https://github.com/clasp-developers/clasp

Cando (the design language): https://github.com/cando-developers/cando

The Feynman Prize: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_Prize_in_Nanotechnology

Alphafold: https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/

More on LEaP: https://ambermd.org/tutorials/pengfei/

Interactive Development of Crash Bandicoot: https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-bandicoot-gool-part-9/ 

Christian's Research Group: https://www.schafmeistergroup.com/

Kris on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krisajenkins

Kris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krisjenkins/

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#programming #software #lisplang #commonlisp #nanotech