Yet another Lisp-related BioBike publication is now available in
preprint form:
"Case Studies of Expertise and Experience"
A Special Issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science , 39,
1, March 2008
Edited by Harry Collins
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/schoolsanddivisions/academicschools/socsi/staff/
acad/collins/expertise/preprints.html#shps
"The evolution of BioBike: Community adaptation of a biocomputing
platform. "
Jeff Shrager
Abstract: Programming languages are, at the same time, instruments and
communicative artifacts that evolve rapidly through use. In this paper
I describe an online computing platform called BioBike. BioBike is a
trading zone where biologists and programmers collaborate in the
development of an extended vocabulary and functionality for
computational genomics. In the course of this work they develop
interactional expertise with one anothers' domains. The extended
BioBike vocabulary operates on two planes: as a working programming
language, and as a pidgin in the conversation between the biologists
and engineers. The flexibility that permits this community to
dynamically extend BioBike's working vocabulary - to form new pidgins
- makes BioBike unique among computational tools, which usually are
not themselves adapted through the collaborations that they
facilitate. Thus BioBike is itself a crucial feature - which it is
tempting to refer to as a participant - in the developing interaction.
>From the body of the paper: "BioBike and its base language, Lisp, are
especially suited to the development of technical pidgins."
"Specialized programming platforms are becoming increasingly important
as computers infuse greater parts of our daily lives and as we wish to
have greater control over them. I have argued that the programming
languages that are the heart of computing platforms serve as, at the
same time, inter-languages in the trading zones that are these
platforms, and that the functions and objects of those languages serve
as boundary objects in these trading zones. I have also argued that
certain types of programming languages, esp. highly extensible and
highly interactive languages like Lisp, are well suited to playing
this dual role. In the BioBike world not only do the participants in
the collaboration become partial (at least interactional) experts in
one another's domains, they also co-evolve the BioBike inter-languages
themselves-BioLisp and BioLite."