[prawks]

The digital media department at my alma mater used Max/MSP to teach programming to art students with a lot of success. It's really fascinating to watch the programs as they run, and it makes for a great way to visualize abstraction and separation of concerns in a concrete way.

[adambard]

My degree included a "Computer Music" option, which were a few classes that were half music students and half computer science ones. We used Max/MSP quite a bit.

For anyone that wants to play around with a very similar language, PureData is an open-source application that is a relative of Max/MSP (they share a creator, and are quite similar). Not wanting to come in to do the homework or purchase the software myself, I used it quite a bit.

http://puredata.info/