The language 'processing'

Processing is a programming language and environment built for the electronic arts and visual design communities. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, and researchers for learning, prototyping, and production. Ben Fry and Casey Reas.

Processing is a Object oriented language with a specific domain of multimedia. Programs are translated in to Java, compiled and executed seamless in the simple but effective Development environment. Once written, an application can be exported as a Java applet for inclusion in a website. All this works exceptionally smoothly once the IDE is installed. The speed of interaction is really marvellous.

processsing.org Processing Home site at MIT

Examples

There is a a wonderful collection on the processing.org site and these come with the download. Here is a taster.

Cellular Automata

Here is a Processing implementation of a generalisation of Conway's Game of life automata in which the rule can be set or selected at random.

Installing Processing

• Download from processing.org. Because it is still in alpha - a very cautious alfa I would say since it seems very stable - they email you a link to the download on request.
• You need an version of Quicktime which provides a Java interface - OK on MAc OS X but Windows users need a down load - see the readme file or this from the discussion log Advice on installing Quicktime 6.1
• You will also need Java 1.4 .

Notes on Processing

Pros

• Strongly typed, so variables must be declared before use.
• Editor is language aware, so is able to do helpful things like
  • highlight the matching bracket
  • color reserved words, functions and defined values
  • beautify the code by cleaning up indents
  • reserve words linked to reference manual (although this is not quite complete)
• Although a pre-compiler, and hence some errors pop through from the Java compiler, its diagnosics are very good. It even advises on a near match to a missing identifier, and in possible use of an uninitialised variable.
• Lightweight class definition syntax
• Classes can be defined, and objects instantiated, but the bulk of the code is straightforward procedural code - with lots of practice in
  • iteration, selection
  • arithmetic calculation
  • mapping - e.g. from one coordinate system to another
• Very powerful set of graphics primitives for line graphics, 2-d and 3-d transformations, image and video manipulationion. RGB and HSB color models. Interaction from mouse and keyboard and serial port. Extensive font libary
• Very responsive - edit compile execute cycle is very short (at least on my 2Ghz machine) so mistakes in syntax or algorithm are seen very quickly
• Visualisation of loops and variables - graphic is the program function, so programs are functionally the same if they look the same.

Cons

• Can break - takes all the processor it can when doing hard computation such as video processing.
• No infinite loop detection - easy to get into one but generally requires reboot to stop.
• Some of the examples are poorly written

Could be either

• No mixed arithmetic - so in an integer expression, each intermediate value is an integer so x / y * z is different from x* z / y
• Needs ability with some basic mathematics and geometry - as all computational graphics does