Definition

As integrated development environment (IDE) and open source language, processing programming language has been specifically developed for the communities of visual design, new media art, and electronic arts.

The basic purpose of its development is to teach the basics of computing in a visual environment, and to become the very foundation of development of electronic sketchbooks.

History of Processing Programming Language

The work on the development of processing programming language was initiated in the spring of the year 2001. This work was started by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. At that time both of them were graduate level students at Media Lab MIT, within the Aesthetics and Computation research group of John Maeda. The developers continue to work on the development of processing programming language.

At the same time, Ben continued with his PhD and later founded the Fathom Information Design. Casey, on the other hand, pursued to a full time teaching and artistic career. Most of the ideas associated with processing programming language date back to the Visual Language Workshop that was developed by Muriel Cooper.

The language got its basic source of development from the Design of Maeda in Numbers project, which was introduced at the Media Lab and was publically announced in the year 1999.

Processing programming language, on the other hand, became a source of development for the Arduino and Wiring projects, at the time when Casey was pursuing his teaching career in Ivrea – Italy, at the Interaction Design Institute. The developments in processing also triggered John Resig to start working on Processing.js, which can be defined as a JavaScript version of the language.

This development then led towards a number of other projects of similar, including the curriculum of Khan Academy in computer science. Apart from that, versions of processing programming language that make use of Scala, ActionScript, Ruby, and Python are also in the course of development.

As the development work done on the language is extensive, therefore, processing and other projects associated with them became the foundation of more than 20 books.

One of the basic purpose of this language is to operate as a tool that enables the non-programmers to enter the field of programming through the immediate visual feedback and the gratification that accompanies it.

Processing Foundation was developed in the year 2012. Daniel Shiffman was also one of the founding members of this project and joint the processing family as the third lead for the project.

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