[Intermernet]

The closest I've seen to this in reality is Max for Live. The speed of development is astounding, and the results are professional in quality, and quite robust. It would be brilliant if the resulting product could be "VST-ized".

It's just a pity it's not cheap (around $700 to $800 for Live Studio with Max). I can see this hampering it's potential as an education tool outside of anything but specialist audio training organizations.

EDIT: I completely forgot about SynthEdit (http://www.synthedit.com/). It can export VSTs.

[bgruber]

Before Max 5, making vst plugins with was very much supported, and was explicitly dropped in favor of Max for Live. Here's a blog post exploring some alternatives from when the drop in support was announced: http://createdigitalmusic.com/2009/05/cycling-74-ditches-plu...