Even if you know how to code in a general-purpose language, you won't beat the speed of these tools It isn't even an either or proposition in general. In grass

Even if you know how to code in a general-purpose language, you won't beat the speed of these tools It isn't even an either or proposition in general. In grasshopper for example you can just drop in a Python on VB node anywhere in your flow and run arbitrary code before passing the output along. It is also really easy to write your own nodes in C# letting you wrap any arbitrary complex analysis and data transformation using any .Net library you want, into a simple node you (or anyone) can just drop into their own flow-based program.