[wool_gather]

I did some programming in Max/MSP way back when, which was fun, and you have a point about the "functional" aspect. It was sort of the opposite of say, C, in that it was actually hard to create side effects even when you needed them.

But overall I agree with other people that I wouldn't want to maintain anything particularly large in that format. The Max "patches" were on the order of big scripts at most.

[wires]

:) I also did a lot of Max/MSP and many similar systems, [nord modular](http://nmedit.sourceforge.net/) , and also wrote such tools back then, for audio and 3d and video, which is what led to statebox ultimately.

I would say the spaghetti aspect of max is the main complaint with visual programming.

To modularise it (small diagrams), you need to contain the behaviour of the boxes (ie. typed purely functional code).

And to generalise it (audio, video, microservices, ...) you need to separate the syntax from the semantics.

(took me about 15yrs to figure out a way to do this properly :-)