Opensource alternative Pure Data is also worth mentioning: https://puredata.info/
Designing Sound by Andy Farnell is a great book to learn about ~PD and sound design in general: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Designing-Sound-Press-Andy-Farnell/...
https://github.com/sebpiq/WebPd
Looks like the creator is gearing up to pump new life into the project (as of 11 days ago!). In the issue linked at the top of the README, he bemoans the fact that he hasn't really had any other contributors. If anyone is looking for an interesting project...
1. webpd doesn't have a GUI editor, so you cannot leverage the browser to prototype new ideas (or edit old ones). With that ability webpd would be like a codepen for audio and therefore garner a lot more interest.
2. Pd's gui logic mostly happens inside the audio engine which is coded in C. It's a huge hairball of code that's a pain to work with.
3. Pd's GUI paridigm is having multiple toplevel windows like the old Gimp interface. That's a pain to use in Pd, but it's especially a pain to try porting that to a browser. An HTML5 editor/display needs to be much less complicated than motif in a Linux window manager.
I've been thinking about doing parallel work on a single-app style interface for Purr Data and shipping it with a feature flag. (Parallel as in not upsetting the current UI.) There has been some interest in such a project for GSoC, but it's a beast of a project with lots of little pain points and detail work to get it right.
* write/script your own "objects"/nodes in some conventional programming language
* abstract a "patch" into its own node (thus writing a node in pd itself)
* yes, they are called abstractions. They also have a nice feature called “graph on parent“, where part of the abstraction's canvas will appear on the parent canvas.