Re: Swarm 2.0 Available

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "DS" == DARREN MATTHEW SCHREIBER <address@hidden> writes:

DS> I've never written anything in Java, so I'm not ready to take
DS> advantage of 2.0 yet (of course 9 months ago I'd never written
DS> anything in Objective C). 

Just in case you're thinking "Swarm's gone Java" or that there is some
big shift, let me say that's definitely not the case: Java support is
a feature we added to Swarm.  You can ignore it if it doesn't interest you.
(This is not to say we don't intend make the feature work well.)

DS> Is it going to be feasible to run Swarm applications across the net? 

Not yet.  Of course, one can already implement ad-hoc communication in
a model designed to be distributed, e.g. moving around objects by Lisp
serialization over sockets.  That's doable if you really want to.

Eventually we do intend to distribute Swarms onto different hosts and
to have Swarm transparently handle everything.  But this is really a
matter of building new Swarm infrastructure in the activity library --
it has little to do with the language(s) involved.

DS> Or, are the main advantages that it will be easier to port
DS> our Swarm applications to other machines 

Many modelers aren't experienced programmers, and we hope the
combination of a well-structured environment with some visual
programming capabilities (e.g. a modern Java IDE) will be useful
productivity help to this class of Swarm users.

While there are things that folks do with the Objective C interface
to Swarm that aren't portable (e.g. using raw integers as keys in Maps),
as I see it, these are the kinds of things vigilant C programmers just don't
do (at least without being aware of the consequences).  Swarm models
implemented in Java will be more portable, but it wasn't really our
goal to improve portability per se.  Anyway, if thinking about portability
isn't something you want to do, but you still intend to hang on to you
model for a while, the Java interface is worth considering.

DS> and develop in a more common language?

Well, my experience is that more people spend more time learning how
to use the Swarm API than the basics of Objective C.  On the other
hand, learning the idiosyncrasies of Unix tools and how debug C is
something that can be a timesink for [non-programmer] Swarm modelers.

On the usability front, I personally think it is most important to
make Swarm work well with modern, popular modeling and development tools --
that means adapting to popular languages like Java.

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