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| Little b | |
|---|---|
| Paradigm | functional |
| Designed by | Aneil Mallavarapu |
| Developer | Harvard Medical School Department of Systems Biology |
| First appeared | 2004 |
| Stable release | 1.6.0 / September 6, 2008 (2008-09-06) |
| Typing discipline | dynamic,strong |
| Website | www.littleb.org |
| Majorimplementations | |
| Linux,Mac OS X,Windows | |
| Influenced by | |
| Lisp | |
Little b is adomain-specificprogramming language, more specifically, amodeling language, designed to build modularmathematical models ofbiological systems. It was designed and authored byAneil Mallavarapu. Little b is being developed in the Virtual Cell Program atHarvard Medical School, headed by mathematicianJeremy Gunawardena.
This language is based onLisp and is meant to allow modular programming to model biological systems. It will allow more flexibility to facilitate rapid change that is required to accurately capture complex biological systems.
The language draws on techniques from artificial intelligence and symbolic mathematics, and provides syntactic conveniences derived fromobject-oriented languages. The language was originally denoted with a lowercase b (distinguishing it fromB, the predecessor to the widely usedC programming language), but the name was eventually changed to "little b" to avoid confusion and to pay homage toSmalltalk.