Hello Processing - Vula

An Introduction To Programming With Processing
Abstraction
Representing the abstract concept of something like data in the form of high and
low voltages with a series of 1's and 0's can be quite useful, but still very difficult
to read and understand. Imagine having to memorize all of those sequences in
order to be an efficient programmer. It would take exorbitant amounts of time to
create the simplest of software programs. Fortunately the process of representing
human-relevant concepts to a computer does not stop at binary code. Since we
know that a certain sequence of 1's and 0's on a certain type of machine such as
the sequence “00110101” can be used to represent the number “53” why not make
the sequence “01001000” and “01101001” represent the characters “h” and “i”
put together to make the word “hi”. This is exactly what software developers do,
the process of taking a complex set of data and representing it in a more humanreadable
format is known as abstraction. As you can image this makes it a lot
simpler to communicate with a computer, so instead of typing “01001000
01101001” we can simply type “hi” and thanks to the process of abstraction our
computer knows what to display even though it's reading a sequence of high and
low voltages at the simplest level.
Abstraction is great because it makes the process of communicating with
computers easier, so you might be thinking to yourself why then is programming
and source code so cryptic and far removed from a common natural spoken
human language such as English? Surely, if we can abstract complex data why
not keep on abstracting concepts to computers until it can understand a human
specific language like plain and simple English?
For example if we wanted to draw a circle on a computer screen why can't we just
say to a computer:
“Computer, could you please draw a circle that has a diameter of
55 pixels and who's center is somewhere close to the top left of
my screen, thanks?”
Instead we communicate with our computers like this:
ellipse(56, 46, 55, 55);
Abstraction 10