I agree.
On 02/06/2015 01:55 PM, Bryan Head wrote:
I think that's a great idea for an extension.
On Fri Feb 06 2015 at 1:53:52 PM Marshall <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On Friday, February 6, 2015 at 12:39:59 PM UTC-6, Jason Bertsche
wrote:
Does it complicate the NetLogo language, though, if agentset
primitives knew how to deal with "agentbags". Maybe there's
something I'm not seeing.
Bags and sets are two things that you can use very similarly,
but they can lead to very different behavior in a model. If
someone is writing code that deals with bags and sets, there
will be cognitive overhead to keeping track of which variables
hold which of the structures (i.e. agentsets or agentbags),
and knowing the difference between the two structures, and
knowing when to use which structure. Not saying that it's the
end of the world, but I think added cognitive overhead is
something that's important to take into
consideration—especially in a language like NetLogo that aims
to have a low barrier to entry.
Regarding debugging, if you're in a situation where you think
you have an agentset but truly have an agentbag (or vice
versa), figuring out why your model is misbehaving might not
be so easy. In fact, you might never realize at all! I think
the reason that this isn't currently a problem in NetLogo is
because all of the NetLogo collections—all two of them, plus
those provided by extensions—use a very noticeably different
set of primitives. There's some overlap in the vocabularies
of lists and agentsets, but not a whole lot.
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Those are really good points.
So I suppose that NetLogo is trying to satisfy two poles of a
continuum: the entry level people, and experienced modelers. And
one of the beautiful things about it is that it does both well for
a broad range of kinds of models, thus allowing for an easy
learning path from one end to the other. For its target modeling
domains, nothing does better at this tradeoff. Maybe the "high"
end is pushing on NetLogo to develop more flexibility, recently.
(I'm not really at the high end--more like the middle.) If
NetLogo became difficult to learn, then someone would have to
invent a new modeling tool that was easier.
Putting aside all questions about ease of implementation,
complexity of code, etc., hypothetically, maybe a good strategy
would be to introduce agentbags only through an extension, with
replacements for agentset commands, such as bag:ask, which don't
work with agentsets That way no one will use bags except when
they really want them, and the bag: prefix will make the
difference obvious. If you want to apply these commands to an
agentset, you would have to convert it to a bag with a command
like bag:turtle-bag. It would be nice if turtle-set would convert
turtlebags
to turtlesets. And if there were an equality predicate that could
tell you that an agentset and an agentbag had exactly the same
members. Not saying this is easy....
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