OpenMusic

Looking at the screen shot brought puredata to mind.

Appears to provide a visual metaphor with code backend. Thanks for posting.

Last time I tried OM, good 5 years back, it required some stupid commercial implementation of Common Lisp. Is it still there?

Hello, yes, it required a commercial implementation of Common Lisp, of which a license at that time (and still today!) can be purchased cheaply, of which you could have downloaded the "Personal Edition", which has very few limitations, none of which concerning the language itself. And if you have asked for an evaluation version, you would certainly have received a time constrained full version of that in your eyes stupid commercial implementation called LispWorks. So - ignorance while using the words "stupid commercial" may be your fault, but by far not the one of either OM or LispWorks. This is of course not the point.

Calling the LispWorks implementation of Common Lisp "stupid", a result of decades of man hours of work of actually not only pretty intelligent, but also very knowledgeable men, who managed to produce a fine product, provided it for a real bargain and surrounded it by a stellar (take my word for it) support for their customers, is sad. Fundamentally. Not in the way of, like if your or mine team wins the 2014 WM of FIFA. Sad in the sense like if I see someone literary pissing at the musicians of the London Philharmonic Orchestra because he doesn't like the sound of violines or just doesn't like Dvořák and especially doesn't like the fact, that he needs to buy a ticket to experience them, one who seems never tried to master any instrument to, if not to understand, then at least to get a feeling about the matter (otherwise he would have already developed some respect), but still he talks about it with words like "stupid commercial".

I hope you don't see an insult in my words, but an inspiration to read more, to learn more. There are intelligent people around you, believe me. And this is rewarding. Finally a lot of them provide their output for bargain (if we talk about Lisp then like LispWorks, but you can take any area) or for nothing monetary (like the authors/maintainers of SBCL).

Regards

The current version is free in several senses, though not all at the same time. The sources to OpenMusic itself are libre (GPL), and the OpenMusic binaries made available for download are gratis (they are self-contained and don't require your own copy of LispWorks). But you do need a copy of LispWorks to build your own binaries. It's free software, but depends on a proprietary compiler.

I believe the main LispWorks dependency is on the GUI toolkit. There have been some porting efforts to SBCL/GTK in the past, but afaik none have been completed.

Well, I was forced to use Windows+LispWorks in college and I found myself (and my classmates) shouting "stupid LipsWorks!" at it more than we should have.

The GUI leaves a lot to be desired and it crashed on my face regularly, progress lost included. Exploratory programming was a real nightmare and I got into a workflow where I basically had to copy any progress into Notepad and paste it all back from the beginning when LW crashed. I don't remember the specifics of how and why it happened, because we avoided it like the plague from there on.

If GP called it stupid he might have his own reasons to do so (even if he could've said it more politely). Dismissing his opinion because of how much effort someone has put into LW is not helpful. The man hours of work mean nothing because as a consumer I don't care how much work you've put into it, but only about the quality of the product which, based on my experience, is lacking.

I hope you don't see an insult in my words, just sharing my experience. YMMV.