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by 15457345234 994 days ago
What does it do that Jupyter - which is used by millions of people, not tens of thousands - doesn't and why does it need a foundation?

Why do you need a language to learn to code when you can just... learn to code in one of the more simple languages then switch later to something more complex such as Java? Python's pretty simple to get started with.
2 comments
michaelhoney 994 days ago
Processing is different beast. It’s a framework, not a coding environment.

Processing is Java + sophisticated graphics and animation capabilties: you create a canvas and you can then draw to it. It has a bunch of functions and libraries for use by artists and graphics people. It’s solid and performant. And there is a Python mode these days if you like significant whitespace.

p5.js is Processing ported to JavaScript.

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15457345234 993 days ago
Yeah I see I was too cynical here. Processing and p5 seems legit. The weird aura of social justice word salad emanating from the foundation is kinda tainting it with BS.
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cornel_io 994 days ago
It has a simple and sane IDE, drawing API and overall environment (including builds and plugina) that's pared down to be cruft-free but very full-featured. Their flavor of Java is preprocessed to be easier to work with, e.g. no classes are required, you can write rect(10, 10, 20, 20); in an empty file and hit run and a rectangle will show up on screen. Things like simple game programming are extremely easy to dip a toe into.

Python tends to really suck for stuff like that as a beginner, because you immediately butt heads with the terrible package management/library situation and why does the pip installer crash with an unhelpful error message and what the hell is a virtualenv vs conda vs pipenv and oh also why does every one of those install scripts crash and ohmygod I just want to draw a line and I see advice like https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844... screw this I'm out.

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