Re: A whiff of reality...

[Marcus G. Daniels]

> "I very strongly DO NOT believe that the development of software
> packages is the answer to the lack of use (of agent-based models)
> in management. In my opinion, modelling software packages ... have
> a great potential for abuse, especially in a management situation,
> where the person using software that they are not REALLY familiar
> with try to apply it to an inappropriate situation. It is too easy
> for assumptions to go unacknowledged, and results to be applied
> too generally and uncritically in these situations...It is also
> possible to too easily publish studies based on prepackaged models
> where the modeller lacks understanding of what the model is really
> doing.

> Many IBMs are rather simple conceptually, and ... basic
> programming techniques can be perfectly adequate. The modeller, by
> programming their own IBM, gains in understanding of all the
> assumptions and formulations included in the model."

In that case, I should hope this person crafts opcode by opcode using
her system's PROM monitor.  Linkers, assemblers, C and Fortran
compilers & libraries do hide complexity and can have bugs, you know.

There's a saying in the Lisp community that goes: bad Lisp programmers
don't write much code, but bad C programmers don't write any.  There
are some C programmers who think that's a good thing -- maybe this
person has that kind of world view.


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