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From: Hernán Morales Durand <hernan.morales@gmail.com> Subject: [squeak-dev] [ANN] BioSmalltalk Date: March 15, 2012 1:32:55 PM GMT+01:00 To: A friendly place where any question about pharo is welcome <pharo-users@lists.gforge.inria.fr>, beta@seaside.gemstone.com, vwnc mailing list <vwnc@cs.uiuc.edu>, The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org> Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list <squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Dear all,
It's been two years since I've started to work in bioinformatics with Smalltalk. It has been a difficult decision because the quality and amount of bioinformatics libraries is absolutely amazing, but I've received a lot of support from the main researchers at the Institute of Genetics where I'm working in Argentina.
Now the initial step for a BioSmalltalk release is done. I hope the FOSS community receive this pre-release as the basis for future enhacements for bioinformatics with any Smalltalk flavor. Although in the short-term it is unlikely for a BioSmalltalk to reach the users, maturity and competitive level of major Bio* toolkits (BioPerl, BioPython, BioRuby or BioJava), it could take too many years more if I continue this work alone. However, BioSmalltalk was not conceived to replace or defeat any other similar packages, but to provide to the bioinformatics community the features of a pure object system. So feel free to spread the word for all bioinformaticians, newcomers, developers, or life scientists, for helping in any way and discovering why Smalltalk is such a special environment.
This release was implemented in Pharo 1.3 custom Core, but cross Smalltalk portability was a priority. I'm working now to release versions for GemStone, Squeak and VisualWorks is there is enough interest. Everybody is welcome to contribute.
You may download a pre-compiled release from the project page: http://code.google.com/p/biosmalltalk/
Best regards,
Hernán
-- Hernán Morales Institute of Veterinary Genetics (IGEVET). National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET). La Plata (1900), Buenos Aires, Argentina. Telephone: +54 (0221) 421-1799. Internal: 422 Fax: 425-7980 or 421-1799.