> I wonder if the correct way to view it is in fact a very terse domain-specific language
Honestly, na. It's pretty verbose. There's a lot of weird ass things in there like "Skip basepairs until you find the matching terminating sequence" (I think it's AG .* GA but its been a decade since my bioinformatics course), but you still have to include the non-AA-coding basepairs in the middle of that.
Compensating for that is the fact that there are like, multiple independent programs; if a ribosome is offset by a single base pair, the result is entirely different. If it runs the other strand, the result is different. And instead of crashing like any program would, biology just learns to use all of those possible encodings. In part, this works because there are 64 possible codons but only 20 amino acids, and the redundancy allows a substitution to affect only some of the offsets.
Honestly, na. It's pretty verbose. There's a lot of weird ass things in there like "Skip basepairs until you find the matching terminating sequence" (I think it's AG .* GA but its been a decade since my bioinformatics course), but you still have to include the non-AA-coding basepairs in the middle of that.
Compensating for that is the fact that there are like, multiple independent programs; if a ribosome is offset by a single base pair, the result is entirely different. If it runs the other strand, the result is different. And instead of crashing like any program would, biology just learns to use all of those possible encodings. In part, this works because there are 64 possible codons but only 20 amino acids, and the redundancy allows a substitution to affect only some of the offsets.