NetLogo

What do you like best?

Netlogo is both a development environment and a domain-specific programming language. The primitives and syntax of the language are tailored to the intended use: i.e. to create a series of autonomous 'elements' of a system (e.g. representing people or particles) and simulate their 'behaviour' within an environment. The language itself is highly intuitive and has a very straightforward syntax. Netlogo also includes a range of straightforward tools to create graphical displays showing the state of the simulation (and other outputs). This allows detailed inspection of the simulation during development and application (it also assists with debugging).

What do you dislike?

Certain activities involving probability distributions do not seem to have native support, such as cumulative density and inverse cumulative density functions (although these could be implemented manually by the user in various ways).

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I would strongly recommend Netlogo as a starting point for social simulation because of its ease of use and its general recognition within the social simulation community,

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

My use of Netlogo has focused primarily on modelling the behaviour of social groups under coordination incentives (incentives to make the same decision regarding a particular social action). Netlogo has allowed me to implement detailed models of this situation and to carefully inspect and explore them.