How Lisp is designing nanotechnology (video, 52 minutes).

An interview on the Developer Voices podcast with Prof Christian Schafmeister on designing enzymes using a custom dialect of Lisp to control computational chemistry libraries.

He initially started from an idea based on CAD applications (written in Smalltalk), but rapidly realised there were too many possible components and combinations to work with graphically and so started treating it as a language-design problem – and designed a custom Lisp based on ECL. Lisp provides simplicity and efficiency, as well as being a “forever” language in which software keeps working over the long term.