I'm interested in this project, but probably only as an end user -- i'm
already up to my earlobes with software projects.


Here's my 3 cents.... (it should be two cents, but they pay me too much)

There do exist other, efficient, fairly easy to learn, reliable,
multiplatform languages.    Everyone seems to think that only C, C++ and
Java exist.  Well, yeah, there's FORTRAN and COBOL, too, but of course
they're out.  So let me turn on the light and show you some other good
candidates.  *click!*  Ah, look at these...

Modula-3 is great!  It runs on all major operating systems, makes tight
fast code, and has multi-threading builtin, a very nice feature for an
interactive app such as a modeller.  It's very important to let the user
click on buttons before an image  has finished rendering, and
multi-thread programming is a nice way to handle that, though, I must
mention, not strictly necessary.   There's a standard library of GUI
stuff.  I haven't used it yet, so is it good enough?  I don't know yet. 
Visit www.m3.org.  

Ada-95 is another possibility.  Ada, the orignal version now called
Ada-83, has a bad reputation for being complex, used only in the
military, and has expensive compilers. But Ada-95 is much improved, and
free and cheap compilers exist.  There's a story about how an
inexperienced Ada-95 programmer, with only one week of work, made a
piece of software smaller and faster than some experienced assembly
language programmers who had been working a long time on the same
project.   So don't worry about efficiency.

Another language, I recommend less, is Oberon.  It has portability
problems in theory, but it seems to work OK in practice.  In a
comparison of five OO languages, C++ won the speed of execution contest,
and Oberon came in a close second.  Modula-3 was a close third.  (Ada-95
wasn't in this study.)   (FYI, the other two were Sather, which ran at
half speed, and some obscure interpreted language.)  Very easy to learn
yet can do anything C++ can, though not always as neatly.

Then there is Python, a very elegant language with a GUI interface to Tk
- it's totally portable to any platform.  The language is normally
interpreted, 


As for Java, for one client I experimented with some number-crunching
code and found Java to be too slower than C/C++. Althogh still
acceptable for what we were doing, it will become a problem if our
project ever grows beyond it's original scope.   Yes, clever software
design can make it acceptable, but do you want to spend the time doing
that clever designing and coding?

All the above languages, and Java, have garbage collection.  C++ does
not.  I have seen similar projects fail or die a slow death due to
memory and pointer bugs that couldn't be traced down. Even if fixed,
those kinds of bugs can take up a lot of time, and can lead to
disagreements among programmers who are not all in the same room
everyday.  That's the biggest point against C++, IMHO.  In favor of C++
is that it's very widely used - everyone knows it, and good compilers
are all over the place.

---

My expertise is in math and geometry, so when it's time to work on that
part of the code, I would be interested in following the work more
closely and contributing what I can.

--- 

Daren Scot Wilson
Member, ACM
dar### [at] pipelinecom
www.newcolor.com
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