processing

[Giles Bowkett]

http://processing.org/

from the page:

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for
people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by
students, artists, designers, architects, 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
commercial software tools in the same domain.

all-time favorite Processing app:

http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/chess.html

it's basically simplified Java which runs as real Java. used as a
teaching tool in courses at Yale, UCLA, the Art Institute of Chicago,
elsewhere. pretty awesome.

--
Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy
http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/

[Roger Critchlow-2]

This is really cool.  The web site itself is an exemplar for a project
support portal, and the learning examples and galleries are
wonderfully entertaining and exciting.

The language itself is a preprocessor that translates into Java source
for compilation by jikes.  That means that you can drop into Java mode
and include plain java at any point, though I haven't figured out how,
yet.  It also means that processing itself piggybacks on the java
runtime and has a very small footprint of its own.  The core.jar is
only 140K, most everything else in the distribution is there to
support the processing IDE.

I wish one of these jvm languages would figure out how to integrate
into Eclipse decently.  The Groovy people seemed to be on track, but
their Eclipse plugin seems to be a terminal work in progress now.
Rhino predates Eclipse, but there's no integrated Javascript IDE for
Eclipse.  The Ruby Eclipse IDE works fine with the standalone Ruby
interpreter, but doesn't integrate JRuby.  Scala, a JVM language with
many higher order programming abstractions, ---

Hmm, Scala (http://scala.epfl.ch/) has a new Eclipse SDT which
installs by the Eclipse update mechanism.  It needs the Windows Scala
installation, but the interfacing is almost clearly spelled out, and
they are excused since they back end into both java and C# and provide
IDE support for 10 other editors.  The list of unimplemented language
features is much reduced since I last looked.  The web site is very
clean.

Scala is sort of the opposite end of the scale from Processing.
Rather than a subset of Java implemented in Java, you get a superset
of Java implemented in Java.

-- rec --

On 11/19/05, Giles Bowkett <gilesb at gmail.com> wrote:

> http://processing.org/
>
> from the page:
>
> Processing is an open source programming language and environment for
> people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by
> students, artists, designers, architects, 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
> commercial software tools in the same domain.
>
> all-time favorite Processing app:
>
> http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/chess.html
>
> it's basically simplified Java which runs as real Java. used as a
> teaching tool in courses at Yale, UCLA, the Art Institute of Chicago,
> elsewhere. pretty awesome.
>
> --
> Giles Bowkett = Giles Goat Boy
> http://www.gilesgoatboy.org/
>
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