Re: Porting SWARM to JAVA or C++

[John Eikenberry [MSAI]]

On Wed, 2 Oct 1996, Christoph Schlumpf wrote:

<SNIP>
> Objective C gets more and more marginalised between other languages like
> C++, Java and Smalltalk.

I disagree. I think Obj-C is growing fairly quickly as a viable 
alternative to these languages. Consider that the GNUstep project is 
approaching a very usable form and all the ports of OpenStep available.

<SNIP> 
> In contrast to Objective C Java has the following advantages:
> 
> - Big community of programmers on the internet

Being a small superset of C, Obj-C has a huge community of programmers
that could learn it in just a few days (if I could learn it quickly,
anyone can). 

> - New professional visual development environments for all major platforms

ala OpenStep (and the forthcoming GNUstep)

> - Runs on all major platforms (the runtimemodule is free)

ala gcc

> - Java is multithreaded (good for User Intrerface design)

Objective-C (gcc) is multithreaded with the new patches available from 
the GNUstep people.

> - There are a growing number of free graphics librarys for Java

The OpenStep specifications provide definitions for all the graphics
needed by Swarm. These are nearing a usable form in GNUstep.

> I'd like to have a java port of swarm!
> What about the other swarm users/programmers? What do you think?

I don't mean this to sound like I'm starting a holy war or anything.  I
just don't want to see swarm drift away from Obj-C. I'm afraid that if a
java version of swarm get's implemented that this could reduce the
contributions to the official swarm and would defeat the premise of
providing a standard environment for research (for reproducing experiments
and the like). I mean if I see some interesting research results that I
would like to verify or reproduce, and the research was done using a java
version of swarm. The first thing I would have to do, before any research,
would be to convert all the code from java to Obj-C. This would be a major
pain and waste a lot of time. 

I apologize if any of this sounded too obnoxious. I meant none of it
to be offesive toward you Christoph and I think Java is a good language, 
particularly for network based autnomous agent research. I just
felt the need to chime in here with my $0.2 on the topic.

Thanks,

John Eikenberry
(address@hidden)
______________________________________________________________
"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order
 will deserve neither and lose both."

                                         --Thomas Jefferson