Last Week in Pony - February 2, 2020

Our community Zulip has over 500 members! Ryan A. Hagenson introduces pony-bio, a bioinformatics library for the Pony ecosystem.

Items of note

Audio from the January 28, 2020 Pony sync is available here. Most of the conversation is related to Joe’s work on looking into integrating a Pony-like language with Verona runtime.

The Zulip got its 500th member this week. What an awesome milestone. Baby steps to programming language domination. Baby steps.

@rhagenson’s introduction to pony-bio

There is growing interest in using Pony for Bioinformatics!

As the admin of pony-bio, I shared my intent on its design with the community, namely:

pony-bio should be tightly integrated to achieve the most benefit – this is counter to a previous Bioinformatics library I designed (sembio/go), which has intentional loose coupling.

I am looking toward Rust-Bio (of which I am also a contributor) as a model Bioinformatics library for organizational concerns and future integration should a pure-Pony solution not be fast enough.

My personal philosophy is that a Bioinformatics library should make the routine and obvious just that: routine and obvious. Additional complexity has a cost, most problematically on the programmer knowing their code is correct as expected – correctness is paramount in Bioinformatics. Therefore, I am using the Rosalind problem set (rosalind.info) as a reference for the operations that should never be made complicated.

A special :tada: thank you :tada: to @adri326, who cleaned up my mess of an initial pony-bio draft.

I invite anyone to contribute to pony-bio and help shape the future of Bioinformatics in Pony! :smiley: Anyone wishing to get involved can reach out to me on Zulip.

Last Week In Pony is a weekly blog post to catch you up on the latest news for the Pony programming language. To learn more about Pony check out our website, our Twitter account @ponylang, or our Zulip community.

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AUTHOR Theo Butler Theo is a member of the Pony core team and student at Drexel University. His interests include persistent data structures, programming languages, and writing software while listening to Swancore.

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