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