What is Processing?

What is Processing?


Processing was initiated by Benjamin Fry and Casey Reas in 2001, formerly of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. We can see it as the follow up of Design By Numbers, created by John Maeda, a programming environment strongly oriented at beginners. It is an open source project free to download and free to use, with already a large community around it.


What and who was it designed for ?


As the Processing web site mentions: “Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.”


Those picking it up for the first time will find lots of very well written and archived code samples, a large amount of information on the internet and answers to question on the Processing forum. The people behind Processing have made huge efforts in helping the community to grow and learn. For instance by illustrating the language reference with clear snippets of code. Thus helping to grasp basic concepts little by little, i.e. image, pixel, array, mouse events, primitive shape drawing etc.


For the more international learner you are pretty sure to find a reference you will understand as volunteers joined forces and translated the reference into 8 different languages. Even if Processing was aimed at beginners, its versatility and ease of development still is relevant to anyone wanting to write creative software pieces.