Max&#x2F;MSP is increasingly popular in music:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cycling74.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;max&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cycling74.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;max&#x2F;</a><p>It looks like something people coming from a modular synthesizer background should be able to get.<p>In fact it makes a lot of simple tasks hard because something trivial like a loop takes an unexpectedly distracting amount of pointing, clicking, typing, dragging, and joining. The DSP and openGL parts aren&#x27;t too bad, but hacking together non-trivial event and data processing logic can be torturous.<p>This is the big problem with dataflow - it makes you keep switching mental modes from visual object recognition to spatial understanding to text parsing&#x2F;editing to causal modelling to UI design.<p>Text has its own issues, but it lets you stay in one mode.<p>I think VB and Delphi had a lot of success because they hit a sweet spot between the two. They let you solve visual and UI problems visually, and logic problems with code.<p>Webspace still doesn&#x27;t have an exact equivalent. Flash came close, but the animation stage added an extra layer of complication. Most web design tools don&#x27;t do a good job of simplifying and abstracting the relationship between onscreen elements and code the way VB and Delphi did.