Swarm futures (was Re: GNUstep and MacOS X Port Effort)

[gepr]

Marcus G. Daniels writes:
 > In it's current form it is good for nothing except historical 
 > continuity.  But that's the rub, either replacing Swarm with something 
 > new and ambitious and interesting or cleaning-up loose ends on the old 
 > version.  I don't see the benefit of larger codebase changes; there are 
 > too many complications.

So, perhaps now is the time to discuss releasing 2.2, freezing it, 
and starting fresh on a whole new thing!  This is my preferred route.

Perhaps we could define a useful Actor Modeling Interface by
interpolating between IMA, Ptolemy, COOL, AUML, APrIL etc. and
implement that.

Or perhaps we could do it in a more bottom-up fashion and pick an
extant tool (like Avida or Bobo) with some cool but un-extrapolated
features and throw effort into that.

Or perhaps we could pick a place where very little work has been
done so far like developing a continually evolving OO database whose
objects and clusters of objects periodically migrate into the processor
for various reasons and marshal themselves to communicate or to 
travel.

Or perhaps we could build an agent-oriented data analysis library 
that takes the kind of data agent-oriented modelers usually need.

The bottom-line, here, is that the SDGs implementation of Swarm is
difficult to use.  It makes great strides in bridging the modeler/
programmer gap; but, in doing so, burrowed itself in deep enough to
make evolving the tool difficult.  On the other hand, many other
packages, by adopting simplifying assumptions, are easier to use, but
are too limiting to be used for large-scale, long-lived projects,
which makes them difficult to evolve, as well.

Or, perhaps we do some combination of all of these, as well as 
continue the evolution of the current codebase.

I, personally, believe it's time to back ourselves out of this hole.
And that means picking a new "mission", possibly abstract at this
point.  If the current codebase fits in with that mission, then great!
If it doesn't, then we wrap that code up and get started on something
new.

I would like the next SwarmFest to hold a relatively long session 
on this... maybe a whole afternoon.  But, in order to do that and 
have it be useful, we need a large population of people, with practical
ideas in mind, to come bat those ideas around.

And this won't happen unless we get some people fired up.

glen
-- 
glen e. p. ropella              =><=                           Hail Eris!
H: 831.335.4950                              http://www.ropella.net/~gepr
M: 831.247.7901                               http://www.tempusdictum.com


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