Long-time user of Csound, Max, and Pd (& have spent a little time with ChucK & Supercollider).
Max & Pd are fantastic for incorporating sensors & other physical interfaces, real-time interactivity, routing signals, creating visualizations, & all that. Supercollider is fantastic for generative music & using control flow compositionally.
Csound, on the other hand, is really, really great for creating beautiful & nuanced electronic compositions. The sound quality is unrivaled (emphasis on accuracy over interactivity), the interface is great (plain text, which, as a programmer, I prefer), and GEN routines plus the myriad opcodes allow you to do some heavy, intricate aural spelunking.
As a bonus (& as mentioned by others), it’s highly performant & fairly easy to integrate with other languages & environments (including Max & Pd!).
The syntax is a bit strange, but once you get over that, Csound is an amazing piece of software.
There's no real reason to consider csound any different from any other synthesiser in this respect: someone who understands how to program a synth just needs to know "which knobs and switches" there are - whether they're physical hardware, a virtual instrument's GUI, or xml statements doesn't matter all that much... the only thing that matters is being able to set and control VFOs/LFOs, ADSR, resonance, unison, etc. =)
Youtube is actually an excellent resource here - search for "intro to Synthesis" or "intro to synthesizers", and move up to "advanced synthesis" (or related terms) and there are boatloads of excellent videos teaching you more than you ever thought was possible.
It might give you a feel for how you can create compositions that sound very remote from what most people would think of as musical. The whole piece is synthesized sound with "instruments" consisting of various types of signal generators composed together.
Max & Pd are fantastic for incorporating sensors & other physical interfaces, real-time interactivity, routing signals, creating visualizations, & all that. Supercollider is fantastic for generative music & using control flow compositionally.
Csound, on the other hand, is really, really great for creating beautiful & nuanced electronic compositions. The sound quality is unrivaled (emphasis on accuracy over interactivity), the interface is great (plain text, which, as a programmer, I prefer), and GEN routines plus the myriad opcodes allow you to do some heavy, intricate aural spelunking.
As a bonus (& as mentioned by others), it’s highly performant & fairly easy to integrate with other languages & environments (including Max & Pd!).
The syntax is a bit strange, but once you get over that, Csound is an amazing piece of software.