Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Something Glen said

[glen e. p. ropella]

Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> Jacob Lee wrote:
>> May I ask why?
> For one thing, Swarm hasn't had any real development work done for over
> five years.  As there is little reason for users to expect new features
> users reasonably tend to look elsewhere.   I'm frankly surprised there
> is any discussion at all anymore about Swarm.

This is probably the cause of the _drop_ in Swarm users; but, it's not a
sufficient condition for the lack of new users.  Even with a fixed
feature set, were the SDG to clearly explain what Swarm is good for and
what it's not good for, I think Swarm would continue to gain users at
roughly the rate it lost them.

The lack of new users has more to do with the comparative ease of use
for the other tool kits.  The investment Paul laid out a couple of posts
ago is just too much for most people.  And even if it's _not_ too much,
perhaps 25-50% of the people who decide to make the investment get
frustrated about half way through their learning process because Swarm
is over-engineered and full of historical artifacts that make it
difficult for users to do what they want.

I think if Swarm's essential API (activity, defobj, collections, and
space) were extracted, leaving behind all the bells and whistles, and
cleaned up, Swarm would still be a useful and competitive ABM package.
A further benefit is that the codebase would be simpler, which might
encourage people to donate code or to hack on Swarm code, increasing the
possibility of new features in the form of "plugin" libraries.

> example, IBM has a new auto-parallelizing Java-like language in
> development called X10 that is in many ways like the Swarm feature set.
> 
> http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/x10.index.html

That's _very_ cool.  Thanks for the pointer.  If I get time, I'll check
out the XTC-X10 project.

-- 
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
Morality cannot exist one minute without freedom... Only a free man can
possibly be moral. Unless a good deed is voluntary, it has no moral
significance. -- Everett Martin