Modelica is a language for modeling of cyber-physical systems

There will always be something so beautiful about node/graph programming systems that simultaneously allow you to go back and forth between the text-based program and the graph representation of the program. That fact that Modelica lets you do this with differential equations in a declarative style, including fairly strong encapsulation capabilities, is quite powerful and fun. The only other system I’ve worked with that gave me a similar feeling of being able - at least theoretically, ha! - to model absolutely anything so long as enough attention to interfaces between systems was paid is OpenMDAO.

The main other example that comes to mind is Cycling 74s Gen for Max/MSP.

Anyways, for those who are curious, Modelica was originally developed for the automotive/aerospace industries (IIRC) but is used in all sorts of fields - for me in particular, I know about it because of its use in modeling operational energy in buildings - everything from geothermal borehole fields and mesh topology district heating/cooling systems to complicated HVAC controls and more.

OpenModelica is the main open source tool for building and running modelica programs, and there are python wrappers you can use as well!

It gets posted on HN periodically -

Most recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42431186

I had thought for awhile to learn Modelica, but the opportunity to use it in a project never came up. More specialized tools were always easier to use - Simulink, or SPICE for electrical circuits.