Max is very cool - however the biggest issue for me is its lack of support for abstractions. This typically results in an insanely complicated visual program for everything except for the most trivial examples.

One of the core goals for Overtone is to provide the means for musicians to share their ideas through a programming-language-like notation. This means readability and understandability are at least, if not more important, to expressiveness with the language.

Overtone should be easy to grok, not appear to be some cryptic puzzle.