In creating StarLogo, I had a very different set of goals. I was not particularly concerned with performance or speed. Rather, I was interested in providing new ways for users to model, control, and think about actions that actually happen in parallel. The world is full of such systems. As ants forage for food, their trail patterns are determined not by the dictates of the queen ant, but by local interactions among thousands of worker ants.
Macroeconomic patterns arise from local interactions among millions of buyers and sellers.
But most people continue to have great difficulty reasoning about and understanding such situations. When people see patterns in the world, they tend to assume some type of centralized control, even where it doesn't exist. When people see a flock of birds, for example, they typically assume that the bird in the front is leading and the others are following. But most bird flocks don't have leaders at all. Rather, each bird follows a set of simple rules, reacting to the movements of the birds nearby.