NEW YORK, Feb 6 – Advocates of the Lisp programming language for biological research announced Tuesday the launch of a new website, www.biolisp.org, to support those who are using or are interested in using Lisp.
Larry Hunter, director of the center for computational pharmacology and a member of the biolisp steering committee, said that the virtues of Lisp include: the ability to create high-level functions that are easily composed and allow for easy experimentations; an environment for building integrated databases and web servers; and full CORBA connectivity.
Such projects as EcoCyc, a database and software system used to manipulate the genome and study the metabolic pathways of E. coli , currently use Lisp code.
“Lisp gives us a powerful software development environment that lets our group efficiently maintain a large code base so we can focus our main efforts on our research,” Peter Karp, director of SRI International’s bioinformatics research group, said in a statement.
Russ Altman of Stanford Biomedical Informatics and Imran Shah of the University of Colorado School of Medicine are on the Lisp steering committee.