Thoughts on Software for the Visual Arts

It’s hard to pin down what Processing is, precisely. I admit, it can be confusing, but here it is: it’s both a programming environment and a programming language, but it’s also an approach to building a software tool that incorporates its community into the definition. It’s more accurate to call Processing a platform — a platform for experimentation, thinking, and learning. It’s a foundation and beginning more than a conclusion. Processing was (and still is) made for sketching and it was created as a space for collaboration. It was born at the MIT Media Lab, a place where C. P. Snow’s two cultures (the humanities and the sciences) could synthesize. Processing had the idea to expand this synthesis out of the Lab and into new communities with a focus on access, distribution, and community. Processing is what it is today because of the initial decisions that Ben and I made back in 2001 and the subsequent ways we’ve listened to the community and incorporated contributions and feedback since the beginning. Processing was inspired by the programming languages BASIC and Logo in general, and specifically by John Maeda’s Design By Numbers, C++ code created by the Visual Language Workshop and Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab, and PostScript. Processing wasn’t pulled from the air, it was deeply rooted in decades of prior work.

via https://medium.com/@ProcessingOrg/thoughts-on-software-a8a82c95e1ad