Re: intros

[Nelson Minar]

Just wanted to thank everyone who has written an intro so far! I've
really been pleased with how the Swarm beta group is going so
far. We've got an interesting group of people, and I think we're
developing a nice sense of community and mutual support.  Now if your
good Swarm developers could just get batch mode and quitting to work,
we'd be set! :-)

A couple of questions came up in the intros so far that needed comment:

Rick Riolo said:
>I finally just got the NextStep Objective-C book: Borders here in A2
>didn't have it and said it is out of print, but they did eventually
>track down a copy for me.  If they are right about it being out of
>print, I would suggest getting yourself a copy asap, as I didn't find
>any of the other books particularly useful.

The NeXTstep book is the most useful one I've seen. My secret hope is
that Objective C is simple enough that with the online tutorial and a
few examples, the basic things will be clear. In reality, a lot of
people will want a reference book, and the NeXTstep book is the best I
know of. 

The fact that it may be out of print is very disturbing - has anyone
else found this to be the case? OpenStep is supposed to be breathing
new life into Objective C, it's kind of strange that the book would
slip out of print now.

Andreas Baumann asked:
>I want to know if JAVA could play a role in a future version of SWARM ?

I agree that Java is exciting, both as an OO language and as a
potential platform for Internet scripting. As near as I can tell,
while Java's syntax looks like C++, the semantics are much closer to
Objective C. I'm keeping an eye on Java, but it's not clear what, if
any, role it will have with Swarm. Mostly it's just too early to tell:
the implementations of Java I've seen just aren't quite mature enough
for serious work.

My guess is Java will be mostly used for "live" web pages, which
unless you try to put a Swarm app on the web won't be relevant.
But that wasn't Java's original goal. I'll be curious to see how the
idea of having software distributed over the web will influence
collaborative free software. If using someone's nifty Swarm GA library
is simply a matter of knowing a URL to it, that would be a great
thing. Realistically, I don't see that happening in the next year.