Thanks, I never expected to hear anything like this when I started out, so it means a lot!

I started around 2014 or so, when there were fewer systems available. I saw Alex McLean perform with Tidal and that was enough for me, although I like to think I would have ended up using it anyway.

The main thing that initially grabbed me was the arbitrary subdivision of time in the mini-notation, something I’d spent countless hours doing painfully by hand in a DAW. I love the terse syntax and simple yet powerful philosophies underlying Tidal.

jarmitage is a legend (in my eyes), so I'm sure he has his own opinions, but TidalCycles (as it is now known) depends on supercollider for both Midi and Sample playback. It communicates to supercollider through the OSC protocol, so it's conceivable supercollider could/can be swapped out for another engine. As is I think the install a bunch of Haskell stuff + install an editor plugin + install supercollider is the largest blocker to getting folks started with tidal. In the pre-tidalcycles era, Tidal played samples (only afaicr) through its own Dirt sample player which was still a separate process, but included with tidal itself. Now it uses SuperDirt which depends on supercollider.

Compared to PD and max/msp, Tidal is far more focused on the pattern language and the magic that can come out of that. Any 'programming as programming' has to be done with Haskell and loaded in as its own functions. Puredata and max/msp both are full (graphical) programming environments with their own quirks and special tricks, but in a way a bit more like Supercollider in that they can speak midi and do playback inside their own engines (afaik).

Personally I've never been attracted to writing SuperCollider code, especially not in a live context, largely due to its syntax, but also its complexity.

So-called 'visual programming languages' I don't find interesting for performance, since they rely on the mouse for program manipulation.

For me Tidal's mini-notation is the greatest music sequencing tool of all time, bar none. Every time someone shows me a sequencer I can usually write the Tidal code in my head on the spot, and save $1000s on redundant hardware. It could only be beaten by being turned into a physical instrument, something I've tried to do in the past: https://github.com/jarmitage/Stenophone.

That being said, even though I'm evidently a big Tidal fan I would still call attention to ICLC and HLCI, where amazingly creative and interesting new systems and approaches are being proposed every year:

https://iclc.toplap.org/

https://hybrid-livecode.pubpub.org/