From Actors and Concurrent Objects to Agent-Oriented Programming in simpAL

Today we are witnessing a fundamental turn of software towards concurrency, distribution and interaction in every-day programming. This calls for introducing further abstraction layers on top of mainstream programming paradigms, to tackle more effectively the complexities that such turn implies. To this purpose, agent-oriented programming can be framed as an evolution of actors and concurrent objects, introducing a further level of human-inspired concepts for programming software systems. In that perspective, a program is conceived like an organization of human workers (agents), pro-actively doing some tasks and working together inside a possibly distributed environment—sharing resources and tools. In this paper we describe a new programming language called simpAL which allows for investigating agent-oriented programming as a general purpose paradigm for developing software systems.