I did some work in Max4live two years ago and while I've been into dataflow programming (visual and textual) for a number of years previous, this really changed

I did some work in Max4live two years ago and while I've been into dataflow programming (visual and textual) for a number of years previous, this really changed my perspective of what I want from a language. Max/MSP-style languages (I've played with Synthmaker and a few others too) have a few major advantages over traditional text-based languages, especially for exploratory programming or prototyping (and the main problem I see cited for these languages is that code quickly devolves into a mess of lines - literal spaghetti code - but I found that with proper software engineering principles this hasn't been a problem for me, just most users are not trained software engineers). One thing that really jumped out at me is that how not having to name things until you're good and ready (because you can simply connect stuff visually without naming or labeling) means you can focus on designing the code and experimenting rather than trying to come up with names for things as you are forced to do in most text-based languages. Visual debugging in Max/MSP was also quite pleasant.