Tidal/Strudel is awesome, the visual feedback, the simplicity of musical expression, that to me makes it a wonderful instrument. They are (broadly speaking) DSLs around functional pattern composition that abstract timing, structure, etc

Audion for comparison is a general-purpose imperative scripting language, a "for" loop is your sequencer, a "thread" is your separate instrument/voice, and timing is a primitive you control directly. Hence the "let's hack music" in the readme. So essentially its the inverse of Tidal/Strudel :) more like a brain than just an instrument.

With Audion, the intention is to provide a few things I was missing in other tools

1. An obvious way to program music/video/lighting/other-events, e.g. use a "for" or an infinite "loop" to trigger sounds & lighting, or a separate "thread" to read sensors on a performer

2. A full-stack: full access to the OS: Network, File I/O, Serial, OSC, MIDI, DMX, et.al., and the freedom to build your own abstractions on top

3. The freedom to mutate state and compose objects, your sounds can evolve and remember what happened before

4. Tight timing: beat-accurate scheduling in control-rate land (Max/MSP needs special care when sequencing outside audio rate), Audion now comes with Ableton Link sync, so it plays well with a full live setup

Right now Audion does not have a UI or visual feedback for seeing what is going on while live-coding, but the plan is to make a separate project/binary "audion-window" which will let you design any user interface you can think of for your audion project.