Re: [Swarm-Modelling] Something Glen said

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Rob Bowers wrote:
> So is it the opinion of the Swarm community that a new user would be 
> better off investing in Repast?
There are a lot interesting ideas out there and toolkits.   NetLogo, 
IMT, Brahms,. EcoLab, MASON just being a few examples.  I'd say try some 
different packages out.  If you just want to write a program that has 
graphical widgets and probes, just take a look at what Visual Studio or 
XCode can do.  If you just want to get started your priorities may be 
different than someone that wants rigorous modeling abstractions.   Or 
maybe you want total control or maybe you want maximum scalability.
> Has a merger of energies been considered?
I think if there was a self-evaluating, distributed, high performance 
programming language and runtime platform that would be 90% of the 
battle.  Like OpenMP with distributed objects, minimally, or perhaps a 
multithreaded R with native code on-the-fly native code generation.   If 
something like that existed and really worked (and scaled) then it might 
be interesting to think about some domain-specific abstractions.   
That's where the mechanical complexity is.