Processing is Amazing
Author: Thomas Gonzalez
I recently discovered Processing, and I am still in awe of what can be created with it. For those of you not familiar with Processing, it is a c syntax (pretty much java) language created at MIT's multi-media center designed to be used by artists and non-programmers to create visual/animated/physical works of art. The primer written by two of Processing's creators walks a person with no prior programming experience through learning to program.
As someone who has been programming since I was 10 years old and close to 30 years now, I found their approach so simple, powerful, and very approachable. Probably even more valuable to me was the plethora of examples that come with the simple IDE. Full particle and physics systems encompassed in less than 100 lines of code! OpenGL support, texture, uvt mapping, typography, and the list goes on.
I see some of what has been accomplished with Processing as the inspiration of what I think will be possible with Degrafa, and I look forward to seeing how far I can push the boundaries of what is possible in Flex/Flash by adopting similar constructs within Degrafa. The interesting twist Degrafa will bring is that we may be able to step away from procedural abstracts and work directly with declarative ones. Degrafa repeaters is one example of how this might manifest.
The animation at the top of this entry was created by Glenn Marshall, who just started working with Processing, but obviously has an incredible amount of artistic talent. What I find just mind blowing is that the animation he created is all done procedurally using sin/cos, looping, recursion and math. There was no use of After Effects, 3DS, or any other tool that translates analog inputs (hand drawing) into something digital, this is purely abstract programming - which just adds a sublime level of beauty to the finished work.
Note: Watch the video in its entirety it gets better, and better, and better ....
Processing is an fantastic language/runtime. I haven't had time to truly learn it, but I am always amazed when I go through the examples and start tweaking values.
As someone who has always loved fractals, trees and all forms of procedural art, it doesn't get much better than that.
As the flash runtime becomes faster and more powerful, I can definitely see a place for Degrafa in this type of art.