Re: Swarm Design Philosophy

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Paul Johnson wrote:

> Dear Everybody:
>
> When I saw Marcus's notes about Swarm 1.2 (below), I started to wonder
> about the direction of the project.
> I'm concerned that there is too much code revision purely for the
> sake of code revision.  I see no new functionality in Swarm by converting
> the classes to protocols, I just see a lot of broken code.  The change
> from Swarm 1.0.3 to 1.0.5 was the first time we saw this.  I can change
> code to match, but I don't see a modeling justification for the changes.
> What can I do now that I could not do before?  Are we just tidying up
> past coding mistakes/poor design?  If so, what is the benefit?  Heatbugs
> ran before just fine, before and since.

[snip]

I agree with you Paul for the most part, as the number of Swarm users increases
and consequently the number of simulations using it, we must pay more attention
to stabilizing the core libraries.

I expect that the Hive would argue however that although the protocol stuff may
appear to be largely cosmetic it will in fact make the code more stable in the
future - since protocols are precisely meant to document the "static" part of
the interface to a particular library, which a programmer can rely on to remain
constant.

In addition to the protocol stuff in general the 1.1 update was a major code
breaker because there were so many  issues involved with the upcoming split of
the GUI into two versions, to take out all references to Tcl in the code except
for the Tcl/Tk GUI code, which some users may in the future do without and
replace with the forthcoming AWK (Java) GUI.

> Since I'm not a programmer by training, I realize my question seems
> naive.  It just seems to me that existing libraries and code syntax
> should not be changed unless there is some fairly immediate justification
> in applications.  If I decided to try to write a "Beginners Swarm Usage
> Guide", as I tried to do three months ago, I would again be put off by the
> feeling that changes in the libraries would render the work moot.

[snip]

This is in fact worrysome, and obviously attributes to the fact that we still
have such poor documentation.

It also brings up another issue - why do we almost exclusively see discussions
on this list about a) installation problems b) requests for work on behalf of
the Hive?

Where are the neato models, objects and algorithms that users are creating? And
as those of us who have in fact contributed models, objects and algorithms to
the website can testify, there seems to be precious little demand for or use of
such code once it is made available...

But then again heatbugs may be the beginning and end of everything :-)

--
With best regards,
-Benedikt

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Department of Economics, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1477, USA
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4/3-7/1 1998:
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