Best tool for creating a societal model

Question

Lets say I wanted to create some software that models a society. People exist, meet, have children, learn, share experiences etc. Which programming language should I use?

I would assume that a dynamic language that enables me to swap out methods and/or implement types at run-time would reduce the amount of plumbing that i'd otherwise have to create in a statically typed language. Am I correct?

Answer 1

In my earlier question I mentioned Repast, Swarm, and MASS as agent-based modeling frameworks. They are useful tools to model societies of agents.

Answer 2

try designing the interaction model first, then choosing a language. Paper prototypes for feasibility might be instructive as well. If you haven't done the design, it is wildly premature to select the implemenation platform and language.

Answer 3

Sounds like ruby. Dynamic, Swap out methods. Here are some of the feature ( from Wikipedia )

• Object-oriented, "everything is an object"

• Five levels of variable scope: global, class, instance, local, and block

• Exception handling

• Iterators and closures (based on passing blocks of code)

• Native, Perl-like regular expressions at the language level

• Operator overloading

• Automatic garbage collecting

• Highly portable Cooperative

• multi-threading on all platforms using green threads

• DLL/Shared library dynamic loading on most platforms

• Introspection, reflection and metaprogramming

• Large standard library

• Supports dependency injection

• Supports object runtime alteration

• Continuations and generators