Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

of code that work like processing machines, which you call when you need them. The
second way uses an object-oriented approach, a far more ambitious and abstract approach
that models a programming problem using concepts from the real world. In objectoriented
programming (OOP), the code is divided into smaller (and independent) blocks
of code called objects.
Before I describe and contrast each of these approaches in more detail, it is worth stating
that Processing allows you to structure a program using either a function-based, objectoriented,
or hybrid approach. In fact, if you want to, you can avoid structure altogether.
This amazing flexibility, accommodating different types of coders with varied experience
levels, is one of the features that makes Processing such a unique environment. Later in
the book, I will go into a much more detailed explanation of this material (I hear your
heart fluttering with delight), but for now I’ll just describe them in very broad strokes.
Let’s go back to the simple five-line program. This program executes from top to bottom.
You could test this by moving the fill(0); line below the rect(width/4, height/4,
width/2, height/2); line.
size(400, 400);
background(255);
noStroke();
rect(width/4, height/4, width/2, height/2);
fill(0);
You wouldn’t see anything if you now ran this program—can you guess why? It’s because
the color used by the program to draw the rectangle starts out as white, the same color
as the background (255 equals white), and is only changed to black (0 equals black) after
the rectangle is drawn. So you are actually drawing a white rectangle on a white background.
Now, imagine that you have 5,000 lines of code—wouldn’t it be easier to not have
to put every line in an exact sequential order to get the program to run properly? Isn’t the
whole digital thing about not having to be so sequentially linear? Function-based, or
procedural, programming can help solve this problem by breaking a program up into
reusable code structures that you call as you need them. These blocks are called functions
(as opposed to objects in OOP); you can think of them as independent processing units
waiting for action. Functions are explicitly called when they are needed and can optionally
be passed values, which the functions can act upon. Calling a function can be considered
the entry point of a function. Once called, a function can either end when it completes its
job, or optionally return values. For example, if I wrote a program to keep attendance in
my classes (something I’ve never done very consistently), I might create a function that
simply assigned a value of present or absent for each student on a specific date. Then in
class, I could call the function and pass in the value present or absent for each student. I
wouldn’t need the function to return any value. On the other hand, if I wanted to find out
which students were absent on a specific day, I might create another function that when
called would return the actual names of the students who were absent.
Let’s make the current rectangle drawing program a little more complicated. Don’t worry
about trying to memorize or even understand the code for now. It is the theory that is
most important. Here’s the program structured using functions:
CREATIVE CODING
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