# Max by Cycling '74

15 Hacker News commenters recommended Max by Cycling '74 and 18 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Fun, deep visual programming environment for music and audio that works like a real programming language. Critics note it is closed and not built for live coding.

## Why people recommend it

- Works as a real programming language (3 comments): "Max is basically a programming language already: message passing, scheduling, state, abstraction, even metaprogramming" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364957)) "Max goes a lot deeper than wiring some GUI boxes together." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48397311)) "shockingly capable as an actual programming language too" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354558))
- Scriptable from external editors and code (3 comments): "If you want to schedule tasks in Max accurately with code, you can either use Max, C extensions, or my extension." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48402635)) "Claude + Max was 1 `max search hubspot --filter` command piped to sort | uniq -c" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47279065)) "Which is freaking awesome, because I can script all of Max from my vim buffers." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46901171))
- Rewarding and fun to learn (2 comments): "when I bothered to learn it was one of the most rewarding uses of time and I find it really quite fun to work in" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48394566)) "until someone walked me through how it really worked" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46359893))
- Lets you build custom plugins (2 comments): "It's so cool and I've spent a few months randomly through the years building neat plugins for Ableton" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354562)) "trying to recreate things with Max so I can have a lot more control and really play with it" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46485789))

## What people warn about

- Closed, proprietary software (2 comments): "Max is proprietary so I can only use a tiny fraction of Mojo on Windows unfortunately." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50135263)) "Max, which is some closed stuff I'm not interested in" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49262884))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Pure Data](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pure-data.md): 13 recommend
- [PlugData](https://hackerapproved.com/p/plugdata.md): 5 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://cycling74.com/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Max by Cycling '74", https://hackerapproved.com/p/max/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).