cadCAD came out of a real need at BlockScience, a complex systems engineering, R&D, and analytics firm to eliminate the significant manual reconfiguration each time additional computational experiments were added to system design projects. Further, alternatives like MATLAB are closed source and limit the ability to collaborate, build in public, or contribute to the commons.

BlockScience incubated the current production version of cadCAD, and from user feedback we embarked on cadCAD Reference (a reimagining in python) for beginners, and cadCAD.jl, a version built in Julia for professional workflows. We are scheduled to release the public alpha of cadCAD.jl this month.

More details can be found in this last update:
https://blog.cadcad.org/token-engineering-newsletter/