masonclj

masonclj is a very small library that provides functions and macros that smooth a few rough edges to using MASON in Clojure. The rough edges are due to reasonable design choices by Clojure and MASON architects; masonclj makes some available workarounds easier to use.

(MASON is a Java library for agent-based modeling. Note: This use of "agent" has pretty much nothing to do with the Clojure language agent concept.)

What's in masonclj and how does one use it?

See the masonclj documentation in the doc/masonclj directory.

Also see the example directory, which contains a simple MASON model in Clojure using masonclj. The masonclj source is under src.

Useful background material

General-purpose notes on Clojure with MASON or other approaches to ABMs are in the doc/general directory. This provides rationales for some of the design choices assumed by masonclj, but might also be of interest to people who want to write ABMs in Clojure without MASON. Some of the Clojure-Java interop notes might of broader interest.

What else do you need to know?

The documentation here doesn't provide introductions to Clojure or MASON. MASON has a detailed PDF manual that begins with a tutorial and a example. To read the MASON manual, you'll need to know a little bit of Java or have enough experience to figure it out as you read. You will also have to learn a bit more about Clojure-Java interop than is usually necessary, but studying the source under the example directory with good interop resources and the MASON manual and classdocs at hand is probably a good strategy. (My majure repo includes some Clojure implementations of the Students example from the MASON tutorial. It's possible that it might be useful to look at that while reading the tutorial in the MASON manual. However, the examples in that repo are poor illustrations of good Clojure style.)

The book Clojure Programming by Emerick et al. from O'Reilly is the best single source of information about Clojure-Java interop I've encountered, but I know of no completely comprehensive source. Some of the documents here may help a little, but they don't go into detail.

And

Please feel free to ask questions, provide feedback, submit issues, pull requests, etc.

License

This software and text is copyright 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 by Marshall Abrams, and is distributed under the Gnu Lesser General Public License version 3.0 as specified in the file LICENSE, except where noted, or where code has been included that was released under a different license.