I'd like to add that Mitchel Resnick's StarLogo and the examples
he describes are truely beautiful. Like Haiku poems, each StarLogo
program packs a whole universe into just a few lines.

Anyone who's interested in simulations, especially simulations of
biological systems, will find Mitchel's book:

  Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams:
    Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
    (MIT Press, 1994)

fascinating reading. After reading it, I just couldn't keep myself
from implementing the core ideas in Squeak. I'd say the performance
of the Java version says a lot about what's wrong with Java. The Mac
version of StarLogo was written in Lisp, I believe, and it's quite fast.

	-- John

At 6:03 PM -0800 7/29/01, Alan Kay wrote:
>StarSqueak (by John Maloney) is a pretty complete (and nicely 
>efficient) implementation of the main features of StarLogo including 
>patch diffusion, etc. There is a small plugin to the Squeak VM that 
>makes all go nicely. According to the MIT folks it is significantly 
>faster than their JAVA version of StarLogo (we are not sure why, 
>since no big attempts were made to optimize StarSqueak).
>      John did as examples some of the "Golden Oldies" in StarLogo, 
>including Diffusion, Ants, Slime Molds, and Forest Fire. These are 
>all part of the StarSqueak Classes.
>      The difference is that it is programmed in Squeak (and will 
>"soon" be programmable in the Etoys and Omniuser authoring 
>environments). This should make Mitchel Resnick's wonderful ideas and 
>POV much more accessable to a wider range of users.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan