Not to mention, it doesn't have to work like this... There are people, and I say this unashamedely, like myself that are experts in how Max works from its lowest level systems such as the scheduler to basic concepts such as order of execution. It is a great language for putting together robust performance software as much as it is a playground for heinous DSP graphs which can break, splutter and fail. A lot of people here are complaining that Max is a bad language because you can't grep/sed/awk it or that it doesn't have unit testing but they're totally missing the point.