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Comment by foobar_ | Hacker News Reader

That was a beautiful read. After a few link hops from Donella Meadows ... it seems there was a programming language to visualize flows -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DYNAMO_(programming_language)

I came across stocks and flows a couple of years back and it certainly changed my thinking. Interestingly this is something we sorta commonly use in backend dashboards to understand the behavior of the system, especially with regards to data. I always thought there ought to be some similar ways to envision economy with this and I find infographics trying to bridge the gap albeit still static though.

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You may be interested in reading more about system dynamics. There are a number of good books out there:

- Thinking in Systems, also by Meadows

- Business Dynamics, by Sterman (slowly working through this)

- Strategic Modelling and Business Dynamics, by Morecroft

- General Systems Thinking, by Weinberg (on Leanpub you can get the PDFs, it's 4 books there, as I recall the first two were published as one book when it was published as a paper book)

I've found Business Dynamics by Sterman to be the best all-round System Dynamics book in my collection (I have three of the above, excluding Weinberg's).

Meadows is interesting and a quick read, but shallow. Morecroft is a thorough read and a decent alternative to Sterman's if you can't get it. But Sterman's really is the best textbook.

I got my copy of Sterman from my sister (who had studied systems engineering at MIT and so had a copy from her coursework there), but at your recommendation from a few years ago.

I worked through (most of) Morecroft because it was available through O'Reilly's online library and I had a subscription through work. I read Meadows specifically because of the leverage points essay, and wanted to see what else she had. It's definitely shallower than the others, but I think a good introduction because of its relative brevity.

I should ask him for a royalty.

Perhaps. She actually gave it to me during her speech at my wedding to demonstrate how big a nerd I am.

Awesome. Pretty much the only book I partially read on systems thinking was introduction to cybernetics by Ross Ashby.

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf

Ashby's book is pretty decent, considering that Cybernetics as a field can feel unapproachable to lay folk. In terms of DNA, cybernetics and systems dynamics both draw deeply from the well of early control 20th-century theory and so there are some conceptual overlaps. In relative terms I think cybernetics does a better job of surfacing the contributions of information theory and system dynamics does a better job of surfacing the impact of stocks and flows on overall dynamics (as its name would suggest).

This post by Will Larson (author of the engineering management book, An Elegant Puzzle, which was published by Stripe Press) mentions some tools for system modeling with feedback loops: https://lethain.com/systems-thinking/.

Might be interesting to you based on the above.

There are a few startups around trying to web-ify Systems Dynamics. I've been meaning to play with Sheetless: https://sheetless.io/

That seems closed. I just came across this ... https://ncase.me/loopy/ definitely looks fun!

Oh drat, they used to have free examples you could play with. (Edit: they still have a free plan, after signup, so I still intend to try it)

I've seen Loopy before, but Sheetless looked more like existing tools with storied histories (Stella etc).

Like any forehead-smacking moron who can code I have sometimes considered writing my own because the thing I miss most of all in systems dynamics tools is being able to use git and write tests. But I know now that writing real software is really hard.

What is the (spiritual) successor of DYNAMO? Would Modelica be a fit?

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