It's used to do all sorts of interesting things, including real economic modeling. I.e., I've seen it used by real economists.
When I first saw NetLogo being used by an economist to demonstrate an economic model, I thought it strange that the NetLogo people had re-used the name "Logo", a kid's programming language, for something that is a serious tool used by professional researchers. It took me a while to figure out that it is the same Logo! And those kids, I guess, grew up, and decided to do something real with it.
R is also a functional programming language used to do very real work.
