Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art

Without getting too geeky, the main objective in the design of Oak was to develop a relatively
simple-to-program, high-level, universal programming language. The really key word
here is “universal.” A proprietary technology (and a refusal by companies to respect and
adhere to standards) creates a difficult landscape to work in. This problem is not limited to
the computer industry. A number of years ago my wife and I invested in a water filter system
that attaches directly to our kitchen faucet. Over the years we’ve moved a lot, dragging
our filter with us. In almost every new home, we’ve had to contact the filter company
to request yet another odd-sized adapter (we’ve got a quite a collection by now). Lack of
standardization has up until recently been especially frustrating and difficult for web
designers, who were forced to develop multiple sites, limit design concepts, and create
crazy workarounds to ensure that their sites worked across all the different web browsers
(this is no longer so much of a problem because of the advent of web standards, better
development practices, and better and more consistent support for those standards across
browsers).
One of the benefits of a program like Flash is a universal Flash player that ensures consistent
content delivery across different platforms (operating systems and web browsers).
The history of Flash, originally called FutureSplash Animator, arguably would have been
quite different had Java not a few years earlier pioneered the concept of a portable,
universal language.
So the emergence of the Internet saved Java. Java’s now well-known slogan, “Write once,
run anywhere,” turned out to be the perfect strategy for the Internet. And by 1996, Java
was also embedded in Netscape’s browser, ushering in a revolution in online multimediabased
content and development. Interestingly, in the ten years since this development,
Flash has far surpassed Java as the online multimedia-based (front-end) content tool of
choice, and Java has moved to the back end of the Web—to the server side. Java is also
widely used on mobile and wireless devices, such as PDAs and cell phones. With the development
of Processing, Java is again being used for online content creation. So arguably,
Processing has saved (or at least resurrected) the Java applet. Although unlike Flash, which
is used to enhance/develop entire websites, Processing (currently) is being used primarily
for aesthetic exploration. Of course, as more Processing tools and code libraries are developed,
this could change. OK, so that’s a nice story, but how do Java and Processing work?
Java is considered both a compiled and interpreted language. Unfortunately, the terms
“compiled” and “interpreted” don’t quite mean the same thing in programming as in general
parlance. To compile, in computer-speak, is to convert a (usually high-level) programming
language into something lower level. Remember, a computer likes zeros and ones
(the lowest-level language), but most people find it frustrating to communicate in binary
code. It is easier to write programs in the same natural language we speak (the highestlevel
language), but a spoken language is extremely complex and would demand tons of
processing to be able to interpret it. Therefore, in the design of a programming language,
there is a trade-off between ease of use and performance.
Java was designed with this trade-off in mind. Sun’s Java compiler, javac (Processing actually
uses a similar open source compiler, developed by IBM, called jikes), converts a programmer’s
code (the stuff we write) into a middle-level language called bytecode (that the
compiler writes). This bytecode (also known as class files) is universal, meaning that I can
take my class files compiled on my Mac and run them on a Windows machine, as long as
the Windows machine has a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). As most operating systems and
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