Re: Drones

[glen e. p. ropella]

dsumpter> Thanks Glen. It was meant in humour.

I certainly took it that way.  Isn't ascii fun?!? [grin]
I sometimes feel like one of those sick people who like to 
play with graph theory in their spare time....  Exploring 
the many ways to express a "tone" with just ascii is most of
the time far more interesting than the content of whatever 
message you intend to send.

dsumpter> I mean I love you guys
dsumpter> at Swarm and I hope it continues for a long time. When it
dsumpter> comes down to it Swarm has knocked about 4 months off the
dsumpter> development time of the work I'm doing and I used to be a
dsumpter> professional OO programmer.

Now, that's a pretty cool comment.  As a prof. OO programmer,
do you find the Swarm kernel (troublesome word, that) written
in an "intuitive" OO style?  What I mean is, I have this feeling
that there's an intuitive feel for most of the code in Swarm
that I might have if I were an OO programmer.  But, I'm not.
I'm a Fortran (yes, it's not all caps!), C, Ada, programmer,
though I like to believe I'm picking up OO as I go.  But, I
don't know if OO programmers see an OO-intuition in Swarm.  And
I don't trust Roger or Chris to answer me on this one  because
they're too close to the product.

dsumpter> For me the the Swarm-support is an essential contact. I work
dsumpter> in a small Maths department surrounded by people who think
dsumpter> that modelling IS differential equations. I've been through
dsumpter> the stages of using the support for instalation to basic
dsumpter> questions about the language till now I'm mostly at the
dsumpter> general interest in modelling level.

dsumpter> So I could probably drone on all night about how good the
dsumpter> stuff you do is but when somethings true its true.

Yeah, cut that short before we all start weepin' and huggin'. [grin]
Seriously, though.  I wonder how much of swarm-support should be
generic modelling/simulation and how much should be Swarm modelling/
Swarm simulation.  This has bearing on more than just what we call
the modelling list when it's created (end of March!).  It could
be a good guide as to how badly something like Swarm is needed.

For instance, if generic mod/sim is aching for a forum, then we 
may as well just try to create a mailing list that addresses all
of those issues and isn't specific to Swarm.  But, if it's just
the CAS/multi-agent mod/sim that Swarm is addressing, then we can
tighten up the purpose of the list, which may cut down on noise
(like this message :-).

glen