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? -- 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/ -- #programming #software #lisplang #commonlisp #nanotech