Re: Heatbug.java continued..

[Benedikt Stefansson]

Apart from the memory leak and garbage collection details, Miles has a point.

But we also know why Ascape is like that and Swarm isn't.  To use an OS analogy
Swarm is a kernel, while Ascape is an application.

None of the Swarm demo applications really demonstrates how one can build
libraries of reusable objects for particular modeling contexts, which carry
through the pardigm of encapsulation and object orientation. From where I stand
that seems to be what Ascape is all about.  It would be a great boon if the 
Swarm
demo models, e.g. heatbugs, were essentially made out of higher level building
blocks which would allow the beginners to start playing around with assumptions
and without worrying to much about C syntax. *)

The Swarm team has never had resources in the past, let alone now, to write 
these
kind of demonstration simulations or libraries for the various subfields. The
Swarm libs were supposed to be a starting point, and users were supposed to
contribute reusable components to the repository at the SDG. That's where the
problem lies really.

I'm not trying to blame anyone, in fact I might point out that  even if I have
used the Swarm API for over 4 years, I have yet to contribute a library to the
SDG.

Benedikt

*) I have to add that beginners actually find object orientation confusing,
because it hides so much of what is going on behind an interface. So from that
perspective there is something to be said for examples where most of the code
that is executed in a method is actually shown in that method.

"Marcus G. Daniels" wrote:

> >>>>> "MP" == Miles Parker <address@hidden> writes:
>
> MP> bestLocation = getHostCell().findMaximumWithin(maximizeFor, 1, true);
>
> This is a good thing, I'm think, for a teaching example, but I wonder
> to what extent that non-professional Java programmers (e.g. academic
> researchers) ever feel a performance cost to implicit allocation like that
> (and the cost of automatic reclamation of it).
>
> Java is among the first languages that can be used for intensive
> number crunching, which is widespread, that also has garbage collection.
>
> I mean, it's easy to see that it is cleaner to not use explict
> call-by-reference objects, but it's not immediate evident to new users
> that there is implicit allocation that has a indirect garbage collection cost.
> (I do think the cost is worth paying almost all of the time, I just
> can't bring myself to sweep it under the rug and pretend it isn't there,
> in general.)
>
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--
Benedikt Stefansson      | address@hidden
CASA, Inc.               | Ph : (505) 988-8807 x101
Santa Fe, NM 87501       | Fax: (505) 988-3440




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