It has more to do with a philosophy Miller Puckett believes. For him, software that grows disorderly is doomed to sink under its weight. That’s why he is Spartan in keeping PD this way. And, in the big picture, he has been correct!
@sslew if you have the time to watch this, it’s all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLACjtOpe0Q
Commercial software has no choice; it must constantly invent new “features” while accumulating the latest trends on top of old legacy code. (Banks work on top of Cobol code that nobody understands; Finale probably has 30+ years of Java code in there, and nobody knows what to do with that, etc. etc.). Proprietary technology makes that worse. At some point, it simply becomes unviable.
PD will probably survive all other computer music environments. Probably scsynth will survive as well, just like PD, but accidentally, not because of planning. It has been kept in shape over the years. Many like to say scsynth has an antiquated “C with classes” style. I, for one, thank god it turned out this way, and we have such a remarkable audio engine today, that still rocks.
On the other hand, I’m not so confident with sclang in the same way. I would probably not write a large project with a fancy GUI in Sclang today, and still believe it would continue to be a robust system in a few years.