[uonpopular_th]

>Where do you even begin decompressing a claim like this?

Start writing the code and see where it takes you. Having done that type of work in grad school I moved from C++ to Guile for exploratory work for that very reason.

I then rewrote the slow bits in C as custom functions much like how you would in Python.

[iainctduncan]

This has been my experience with music programming as well, music (not audio - music) being a highly symbolic domain. The past-me that had not experienced first class symbolic programming support would not have believed how much easier it is in a symbolic language (in my case Scheme). The size of my music code in Scheme compared to C/C++ or Python is an order of magnitude smaller.