Daniel Shiffman, professor at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of Learning Processing: A Beginner’s Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction, interviews Casey Reas & Ben Fry for Rhizome – Wednesday, September 23rd.

Created by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, 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 an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

I first discovered Processing in 2003 at ITP while exploring different options for creating a set of tutorials about generative algorithms. We quickly realized that Processing could transform our approach to teaching programming and have adopted it as the language learned by all incoming students. I’m thrilled to have this chance to talk to Casey and Ben a little about the origins of Processing, their philosophy, work, and plans for the future. – Daniel Shiffman

How did you each discover computation? What was the first program you wrote and in what language?

Casey Reas: I was very lucky that my dad brought an Apple II into the house in the 1980s. These early home computers encouraged programming and there were books on programming in Basic written for kids. I don’t remember if I started with Basic or Logo, but I learned a little with both. I hit a wall and I wasn’t motivated to learn more. (I love playing video games on the computer more than writing my own small programs.) I was introduced to Lingo when I was in college, but I only wrote simple scripts for moving back and forth in the timeline and turning on and off sprites. When I shifted from working in print to the Web in 1995, I fell in love with the potential for making and writing software. I engaged fully with C in 1998 when I took classes at NYU extension, something clicked, and I started to really learn for the first time. I quickly moved on to C++, then later to Java and Perl at MIT.

Ben Fry: I started with an Apple II+ and an IBM PC that my Dad brought home from the university, though I can’t remember which was first. I learned BASIC on each, and that evolved into other machines (a whole string of Macs starting with the original 128K version) and languages (Pascal, C, C++, PostScript, Perl, Java…) The first program of consequence was a stock market game (ah, the embarrassment) that I sold for $250 when I was in seventh grade.

Roots Multi Touch Tangible Installation Teaser from BricK Table on Vimeo.
Memo Akten, Owen Vallis, Jordan Hochenbaum, 2008
(From Collection: A curated exhibition of Processing software.)

Tell us a little bit about the origins of Processing. Where and when did you have your first conversation about creating it?

CR: It was sometime in June 2001, as I was finishing up at MIT. We made of list of the basic specs for the environment and drawing functions. It was one 8 ½ x 11 inch typed page. By the fall, Ben had something working and the first workshop took place Japan in August, 2001.

BF: Yeah, revisions 0003 and 0005 were used for a workshop at Musashinio Art University (MUSABI). I spent the first part of the week teaching Design By Numbers and then some of the students tried “Proce55ing”.

When looking at other programming environments geared towards visuals (Design by Numbers, Logo, etc.) what kinds of things did you want to emulate and what did you want to do differently?

CR: For us, the big idea of Processing is the tight integration of a programming environment, a programming language, a community-minded and open-source mentality, and a focus on learning — created by artists and designers, for their own community. The focus is on writing software within the context of the visual arts. Many other programming environments embodied some of these aspects, but not all.

John Maeda’s Design By Numbers is the direct parent of Processing. Our goal was to emulate its simplicity and focus on making images, animation, and interaction. But, we wanted to exceed the limits of DBN: 100 x 100 pixels, grayscale, and integer math. John wrote his account of the origin for Technology Review.

Processing has clearly been influenced heavily by PostScript and Java. We feel our ideas are not inherently tied to Java, but the current versions of Processing are reliant on it.

BF: Right, we wanted to connect the simplicity and immediacy of BASIC or Logo or a scripting language with a more sophisticated language like Java. And we wanted to make the syntax and API very simple and terse so that common-use operations had straightforward naming.

read the full article at Rhizome