From the Community: Musings on language and life, with special reference to ‘programming’ | Making Science Public

Musings on language and life, with special reference to ‘programming’

This morning I opened the newspaper and read an article about a new language that lets researchers design novel biological circuits. I mumbled something about this over coffee and my husband said, oh but wasn’t that old hat, we all knew that DNA was a language, code etc. So what was new? I looked again at the article and stumbled upon the word ‘compile’. So I said that all this apparently had something to do with programming and compilation. Ah, he said, now that is interesting, if it’s about compilation. I was none the wiser, being no computer or programming aficionado. Once the coffee was ingested and I had woken up a bit more, I read the newspaper article properly. For more detailed info see New Scientist, for example; and for even more detail, read the article in Science – but I didn’t read those this morning…