First Impressions
System dynamics program with additional features for economics
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hpcoder,
profstevekeen
Let me preface this by saying a couple of things. First I don't know much about economics beyond what I read in your book Debunking Economics, plus what I've learned following the current economic fiasco for the last five years on various financially oriented web sites, especially Naked Capitalism. However I have had considerable experience testing software from the user perspective, specifically on systems used for the operation of electric utility systems, the field I worked in for 4 ½ decades.
Bear in mind that I am not aware of what is in your design specifications beyond the fairly general information that is available in the help document and what I have been able to glean from the videos and text at the Minsky Kickstarter webpage and your blog posts. It's likely that some of the suggestions I have are in your plans but haven't been implemented yet. Thus, my comments may or may not be useful to you, or more likely a mix of both.
At first blush my primary observation is that I don't see any top-level editing functions. For example when I was playing it around on the screen and connected a wire between two functions I did not see how I could select that wire later and delete it or undo it. These sorts of things could come under a “Edit” item to the right of “file” on the menu bar. At a minimum there should be a Delete function. Cut, Copy and Paste would also be desirable although I recognize that these would be more complex, since if you copied things like variables the software behind the curtain must change such things as variable names to avoid redundancies. These latter three functions would be especially useful if they came with a rubber band capability. That is the, the user would drag the cursor to identify a rectangle to be copied or cut, and then paste it to another location It would be very useful, it seems to me, to use this capability to be able to have two very similar models on the same page, each feeding and output to a chart. If the two processes are stimulated simultaneously this would provide for an easy comparison of the outputs. I recognize that implementing something like this could get messy and costly in a hurry.
As I spend more time experimenting and learning Minsky, I'll pass on additional comments. So far I'm very impressed with what I've seen.
Regards, Chuck
PS: About 20 years ago I had a consulting gig at Queensland Electric Commission. My employer was partnering with a small firm based in Sidney. I greatly enjoyed the people I was working with as well is the all too brief visit to your country. I was very much looking forward to additional business trips there in hopes of being able to connect at least one of them with an extended stay for pleasure travel. That was not to be, however; soon after that first and only trip our partner was bought out by our largest stateside competitor and thus our firm was shut out of further work.
I've already found that I was a bit premature in what I posted a few minutes ago. Some of the editing functions I suggested are there. Guess I need to do more exploring before spouting off.
As you point out, cut/copy/paste is a desired feature planned for the
upcoming Petty iteration. In fact the functionality is basically
there, as part of group functionality, but not in a conventional
form. You can create groups by "rubber banding", delete groups, move
groups and copy groups.
I'm not sure what you mean by functions in the Edit menu - most of the
things you mentioned are available in the context menu from the right mouse
button. Perhaps you can expand more on what you mean by that.
Cheers
--
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpcoder@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au