success/feedback

[Ralf Stephan]

Here is one datapoint for you.  The time needed for building a first
model was about 20 hours.  No prior working experience with Swarm or
ObjC, but years of C and gdb, as well as OOP.  No outside help apart
from documentation, code, and an ObjC online book.

http://www.in-berlin.de/User/rws/swarm.html

This is a very crude, of course, and debatable model (see README).
Most of the time was spent hunting a few idiotic bugs, and I had to
use gdb plus common sense extensively.  No major problems with Swarm 
was found but I have a few picks/ideas:

- when messages are going into nirvana, there should be a fast way,
  esp. for beginners, to see if it's the object or the selector.
- of course, it's a big no-no to change members of an ActionForEach
  while executing it, so I immediately stepped into that.  Finding
  the bug was horrible (at the end I commented out whole chunks of
  code), and it reminded me vividly of my first stack overflow.
- uninitialized pointers don't always seem to contain 0x0, so one can't
  be sure if it's memory corruption.  So there is no way out of 
  defensive programming.

Maybe emphasizing such things more within the documentation, or finding
ways to catch these at runtime would flatten learning curve for
beginners.  I shudder when imagining how a gdb newbie would have
handled these things.

Take it as beta tester feedback.  I look forward to staying with
Swarm and contributing by patches and articles such as this.  As
I'm an entirely private user, don't expect more.

Kudos to the authors,
ralf
-- 
http://www.in-berlin.de/User/rws/
It's all like keeping two or three ants together.

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