> I like all of these tools but can't help feeling I'd be more effective if I could just get at the underlying code half the time (in cases where that's not an

> I like all of these tools but can't help feeling I'd be more effective if I could just get at the underlying code half the time (in cases where that's not an option). I've seen novices do cool stuff with Max without thinking that. Perhaps this feeling comes more from familiarity with textual coding than something fundamental about textual coding. On the other hand, we keep saying "a picture is worth a thousand words", but here we are writing blog posts in gobs! That suggests that text is what we train for, and is what we might be most effective with in the future too.