Super Systems and the Agency Programming Language

Presented at Armstrong Atlantic State University in 2010 for my graduate level Technical Writing course.

Agency has been renamed to Discourse; re-imaged and redesigned in 2013. Discourse currently resides on Github at: https://www.github.com/mjstahl/discourse.

Transcript

1. Super Systems and the Agency Programming Language Mark Stahl Armstrong Atlantic State University
2. Outline of this talk •The Problem •Putting Things into Perspective •The Approach
3. The Problem
4. Definition "Given the issues with today's software engineering, how can we build the systems of the future that are likely to have billions of lines of code?" Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Army Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University 2006
6. Research •12 months •7 identified areas of research ◦ Human Interaction ◦ Computational Emergence ◦ Design ◦ Computational Engineering ◦ Adaptable and Predictable System Quality ◦ Policy, Acquisition, and Management
7. Adaptive System Infrastructure (ASI) "ASI investigates integrated development environments and runtime platforms that will support the decentralized nature of Ultra-Large Scale Systems."
8. Putting Things into Perspective
9. Code vs. Time 1,000,000,000 lines of code (LOC) 1 LOC / sec ~32 years (1978) No Requirements No Design No Testing
10. Code vs. Time 1,000 billion (1 trillion) LOC ~31,689 years (29,679 B.C.)
11. Systems of Systems
13. The Approach
14. Review: Adaptive System Infrastructure "ASI investigates integrated development environments and runtime platforms that will support the decentralized nature of Ultra-Large Scale Systems."
15. Runtime Platforms that are (largely)... •Approximate •Fault Tolerant •Concurrent / Parallel •Inconsistant
16. The Agency Programming Language •SmallTalk-like syntax •Actor Model Semantics •Asynchronous Message Passing
17. Syntax Rectangle perimeter @length + @width. •Agent (Component) •Behavior (Function) •Attribute (State)
18. Semantics Actor Model •Carl Hewitt (1977) •Universal Primitive of Concurrent Computation •Send Messages •Receive Messages •Create Actors
19. Semantics
20. Message Passing
21. Questions