• Question: what coding language is used to develop drugs?

    Asked by anon-196020 to Lee on 7 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Lee Steinberg

      Lee Steinberg answered on 7 Mar 2019:

      Lots of programming languages are used for drug discovery. A lot of the quantum mechanics calculations need to be incredibly efficient, are are written in high level languages such as C/C++. Some software packages are very old, and are written in Fortran 90 or Fortran 77. I know of people who use mainly Java, and a few Lisp users. Intense statistics are often calculated using the R language.

      I work almost entirely in Python 2.7 and Python 3.x. This is because there is already a large code base in this language, meaning I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Also, Python is a fairly easy language to learn, because a lot of the language is designed to improve readability.

      If you want to learn a single language, I would recommend using Python, because it is becoming the most commonly used language. A good resource to begin might be CodeAcademy!

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