The nice thing about VPLs is that they are more intuitive to people with non-programming experience. I imagine many Max/MSP / PD artists have never written a li

The nice thing about VPLs is that they are more intuitive to people with non-programming experience. I imagine many Max/MSP / PD artists have never written a line of C in their life. And even if you have programming experience, VPLs can be a lot quicker to set up for certain tasks versus writing a full fledged plugin. So VPLs can be great as a prototyping / experimentation tool. But yes, absolutely, for more complex tasks (and my examples would be: DSP routines such as filtering, anti-alias oscillators, etc.), it would be better to use a text language. Both PureData and Max/MSP have external objects (that you write and compile in a text based language) for this purpose... although, even these objects will never be as fully optimized as a plugin that is completely text-language based.