I mentioned StarLogo before as an Emergence-based framework, & just found out that they have a new version – The Next Generation. Take a look on the new interface:

StarLogo TNG Screenshot

Seems like their trying to make programming accessible & simple as visual puzzle building, & the runtime view as intuitive as video games. What a cool approach to simplifying programming: suit it for children.

I've worked with a process-based development environment, which I believe is the enterprise-class state-of-art visual programming (Tibco's BusinessWorks), but the StarLogo approach to logic programming is completely different, taking the physical machine building metaphore instead of the process diagram one.

Another interesting new feature is the ability to see the simulation from one of the agent's POV (& in cool Quake-engine-based 3D…). This doesn't provide much more emergence-visualization insight, but it does help educate the observer about the relevance of emergence simulation & our world: we're simply part of a multi-agent emergence-based "simulation". The visualization is very fast, as the simulation speed is normally faster than life, but is still quite amazing. It reminds me the accelerated speed in Reggio's films, which was his trick of educating his viewers on the machine of which they're part.