I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard it's really cool, and have read people who've used it praising its virtues and discussing its limitations. It sounds like something I'd like, since it's great for agents and cellular automata.
NetLogo – A multi-agent programmable modeling environment (northwestern.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18180542
https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/
Seymour Papert has died (mit.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12201810
http://www.media.mit.edu/people/in-memory/papert
You might also want to check out some of the stuff in these papers, one pretty old, and the other much more recent:
“A Taxonomy of Simulation Software: A work in progress” from Learning Technology Review by Kurt Schmucker at Apple (1999).
http://donhopkins.com/home/documents/taxonomy.pdf
"Gadget Background Survey" by Chaim Gingold (who made Earth Primer), research he did at HARC for the Gadget project with Dan Ingalls (who made Squeak and Lively), which includes Alan Kay's favorites, Rockey’s Boots and Robot Odyssey, and Chaim's amazing SimCity Reverse Diagrams, and lots of great stuff I’d never seen before:
Gadget Background Survey
http://chaim.io/download/Gingold%20(2017)%20Gadget%20(1)%20S...
Earth Primer
https://www.earthprimer.com/
Experimental Gameplay Workshop 2015: Earth Primer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtsf3nRFfwk
YOW! 2016 Dan Ingalls - Pronto: Toward a Live Designer's Notebook #YOW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if72CFsF_SY
The following NetLogo HN links didn't get as much discussion as they deserved, but here they are:
Show HN: NetLogo Implementation of Conway's Game of Life (github.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20074810
https://github.com/gsurma/game_of_life
Biological Simulations (NetLogo, 2008) [pdf] (northwestern.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18188139
https://ccl.northwestern.edu/2008/colosimo_paper.pdf
Linking NetLogo with Python [pdf] (surrey.ac.uk)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18185528
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/21/2/4/4.pdf
NetLogo: Design and Implementation of a Multi-Agent Modeling Environment (2004) [pdf] (northwestern.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18177290
https://ccl.northwestern.edu/papers/agent2004.pdf
Distributed Channel Assignment in Dense WLAN Networks Using NetLogo (thinkmind.org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18173939
https://www.thinkmind.org/download.php?articleid=icas_2014_2...
NetLogo (programmable modeling env for simulating natural and social phenomena) [pdf] (northwestern.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18170128
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/docs/NetLogo%20User%20Ma...
Cellular Automata for Pathfinding in NetLogo (cestlaz.github.io)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10921012
Updated link that works:
https://cestlaz.github.io/posts/2016-01-17-maze-ca.html/
Cellular Automata, NetLogo and real problems
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10913564
Updated link that works:
https://cestlaz.github.io/posts/2016-01-15-shift-image.html/
Some more links and discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18496880