Programming DNA

[faendryl]

So, DNA is machine code (except it's got four instead of two). I expect there'll be DNA hacking at some point; that's not a surprising thought. However, no one programs in machine code these days (if you do, you don't count as a person. Sorry.). Instead we program in higher-level languages, such as C. I wanna program in DNA++, though. I

Comments

[a_dodecahedron]

Very interesting question. Since the interface was produced by a genetic algorithm, of course, it's a huge egregious yet ingenious hack with no documentation, which complicates things. Certainly a DNA compiler is theoretically possible, though.

DNA++ would have to be different than both programming and natural languages, since both of those are temporal, in the sense that "execution" follows one path through the "code," but DNA is continually getting read at different times in different places. It'll be like writing code for several thousand daemons at the same time.

Maybe one level of abstraction would be listing the proteins you want expressed and not expressed? I wish I knew enough biology to come up with better ideas here.

[faendryl]

Sure, editing existing DNA would be nasty. Fortunately there are currently a lot of people working on reverse-engineering the binaries!
Protein choice might be a bit too high-level for the base language, since you might want to write new proteins? Perhaps proteins could be similar to classes.

[reubgr]

DNA++? Ugh.

I'd rather program in Duby or Dython.

[faendryl]

Pfft. I want optimized DNA. Don't give me none of your array bounds checking.

[reubgr]

Might as well call it Cancer++ then.