[Biosqueak] The germ of an idea

Karl Ramberg karl.ramberg at chello.se
Tue Aug 28 19:07:46 UTC 2001


John Tobler wrote:
> 
> The last thing I personally need right now is to tangle with a major
> non-paying project, so I have decided to start on the design and development
> of a Biosqueak initiative.  It rubs me the wrong way to see
> Bioeveryotherlanguage.org and not to see our beloved Squeak represented.  I
> would appreciate any and all comments, signs of interest, etc.  I will
> probably get rolling with implementing some of the simpler bioinformatics
> routines, following models already available in Biopython, Bioperl, and
> Bioruby.  Anyone else who is interested in applying Squeak to bioinformatics
> problems is most welcome to join in.
> 
> I am guessing that we will face some formidable obstacles.  As Heiko
> Schaefer pointed out in a recent post, "... little emphasis has been given
> so far on numerical work with squeak."  Will someone please correct me if
> this assessment is unfair?  It looks like some related work is underway by
> the Numerics group at the Camp Smalltalk connected with the ESUG conference
> in Essen.  Hopefully, something approaching the capability of Numeric Python
> (NumPy) will magically appear just before we need it for Biosqueak. I am
> also sure that bioinformatics processing will fully test Squeak's mettle on
> text searching and pattern recognition.  Where do we find support for
> regular expressions and the like?  I anticipate that trying to solve such
> real world problems as sequence searching, sequence allignment, and protein
> structure prediction will point out areas where we can improve Squeak's
> reach and performance.  There should be a challenge or two here to keep
> hardy pioneers and somewhat unstable test pilots interested.
> 
> Anyway, I intend to get started.  This is just a "heads up" that Biosqueak
> is out there somewhere on the vast horizon.

Maybe this is of interest
Genetic Algorithms in Squeak

http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1716

Karl




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