Re: slightly off-topic: support open source for publically-funded research

[glen e. p. ropella]

At 03:09 PM 11/16/2001 -0700, Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> [Unfortunately, my experience is that a lot of people doing agent-based
> modeling are not at all comfortable (or willing) to read code, and
> thus little insight is gained by having access to it.]

This is the point, of course.  The long-awaited capabilities of
software reuse hinge upon being able to describe software without
requiring the audience to be intimately familiar with the software.

And software descriptions can come from either black-box descriptions
or white-box descriptions.  Requiring white-box descriptions would
do damage to the concept of abstraction and reuse.  White-box
descriptions also require the audience to be programming literate.

> Well, an oscilloscope is a well understood thing.  It is less clear,
> say, that a specification of concurrent scheduling for different agent
> types is a language that is sufficiently common and concise to
> substitute as an instrument in the same way an oscilloscope does.
> I hope that will happen eventually..

I actually don't think that an oscilloscope is that well understood,
at least not at a white-box level.  At a black-box level, I agree.
It is this level that we need to get to with software in order
to promote good science (indeed good anything) with software.

I think we *can* get to this level eventually.  In the meantime,
I'm a strong proponent of publishing the complete spec for any
piece of equipment (including the compiler, the run-time, and the
underlying hardware -- thank god for GNU/Linux).  But, I'd never
*force* someone to publish that level of detail and set a precedent;
because that just encourages the Bad Behavior(TM) of avoiding
software reuse and tending towards special-purpose, one-off work.


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