Notes on Pragmatic Agent-Programming with Jason

AgentSpeak(L), together with its implementation Jason, is one of the most influential agent-oriented programming languages. Besides having a strong conceptual influence on the niche of BDI-inspired agent programming systems, Jason also serves as one of the primary tools for education of and experimentation with agent-oriented programming. Despite its popularity in the community, relatively little is reported on its practical applications and pragmatic experiences with adoption of the language for non-trivial applications. In this paper, we present our experiences gathered during an experiment aimed at development of a non-trivial case-study agent application by a novice Jason programmer. In our experiment, we tried to use the programming language as is, with as few customisations of the Jason interpreter as possible. Besides providing a structured feedback on the most problematic issues faced while learning to program in Jason, we informally propose a set of ideas for solving the encountered design problems and programming language issues.

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