[iainctduncan]

Doing interrupt level scripting in it works just fine - lots of people have done it in C, C++, Scheme, and other extensions. I take it on stages and have produced music with it extensively. Scheme for Max is written using all the same C primitives from the Max SDK that the other Max sequencing options use and has been load and timing testing exhaustively.

I'm currently a PhD candidate in it, have previously used Csound, SuperCollider, Max, Pd, Common Music, and others, and have published/presented at conference on this topic. Of everything I've tried, I prefer working in Scheme in Max over other options. It is definitely practical and accurate. (Though in Scheme in Pd has soe nice features too!)

[windowliker]

Can your external place objects and route cables around on the patch? That's the main thrust of my original comment, which is that JS scripting can help avoid having to patch lots of objects together in the GUI. Live scripting music is beyond the scope of my advice.

[iainctduncan]

You specifically brought up "scheduling tasks". There is a JS task scheduler, but it comes with a caveat - the scheduled timing is accurate but the time of executing is not accurate because it runs in the UI thread. Hence my comment.

If you want to schedule tasks in Max accurately with code, you can either use Max, C extensions, or my extension.

yes, you can do patcher scripting from S4M as well as you can easily send messages to named objects, which is all you need in order to be able to do that. That is how max patching works - whether you do it in the GUI, JS, or messages to the patcher, the whole thing is just objects sending messages to other objects, and the patch is just a connected graph of references of instantiated objects. If you send message to a thispatcher object, you achieve the same thing under the hood as manipulating the GUI or going through JS. You can read about it if interested in the Max SDK documentation and in the Cipriani & Giri books on thispatching.