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Comment by msutherl | Hacker News Reader

As always, the multi-media programming environments are miles ahead and nobody knows about them. Field is amazing. Max/MSP, Pd, et al. are a different paradigm altogether, but have had live editing, documentation a click away, etc. and have been in heavy use for 20+ years.

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I've been using Max/MSP lately and while I find the language itself lacking (one example of something I wish I could do is nested lists), the editor is amazing. The live programming is ahead of any normal REPL I've used and the debugger is pretty cool too.

If it had a few extra features it would make it pretty close to my ideal programming environment: a way of (temporarily) disabling selected code; a unit testing mechanism and a way of extracting selected code to a unit test; a visual code diff tool; git integration (especially branches)

Where can I find a list of these amazing multi-media programming environments that I've never heard of before, but which look so awesome?

I was unable to find anything close to a definitive list, but http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_programming_language is a start.

Max/MSP, Pure Data, vvvv, QuartzComposer, SuperCollider, ChucK, Processing, openFrameworks, Cinder, and Field are the big names.

But there are many more smaller projects such as Lubyk, Overtone, LuaAV, Faust, Plask, Impromptu and Fluxus.

I also want to plug NoFlo, which is a 'flow-based programming' library for node.js, which integrates with a visual editor.

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