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As much as I admire Processing for making it easy to draw pixels on the screen, something that seems to get more difficult every year, I do find it very difficu
by motform 5y ago
As much as I admire Processing for making it easy to draw pixels on the screen, something that seems to get more difficult every year, I do find it very difficult to use as a teaching tool. Going from Hello World to something more intricate is a bumpy ride with very few affordances, the feed through from drawing a rect to interfacing with I/O is, while obviously a difficult problem, non-existent. "Creative coding" also requires both a high degree of mathematical and artistic capability in order to be something other than a soup of primary color on the screen, something beginning programmer (esp. "non-technical" ones) tend to struggle with.
Then there is also the famous Bret Victor article: http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/ http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
That said, I still really admire what they did and how extremely influential it has been. Just a small thing like how the the Processing IDE was forked to create the Arduino IDE attests to how Processing continues to reverberate throughout history.
- joeberon 5y agoProcessing is very bizarre to be fair. A weird amalgamation of Java and some custom thing. A lot of the types are very clunky to use. Making your own types is obviously quite counterintuitive, and it in no way benefits from the static typing. I think p5.js is generally easier, though I think it's much less "satisfying" than using a separate tool (being in the browser never feels good to me)