Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by thathonkey 4332 days ago
There's plenty of reasons why there would be such a state of affairs. Probably the biggest is that there is no clear winner in this space. D3 is shoring up, but it is quite a bit more complex for non-devs IMHO than what this looks to be. Frankly this is a pretty lazy comment. You could just look at the link's "Start" page for <5 minutes and see for yourself why it's different enough to warrant existence and could legitimately be in the running with the X other JS frameworks that have overlap in canvas drawing.

I mean it's in beta, clearly, and people are in here harping about the accessibility of one of the presentations on the site and comparing it to relatively mature (eg D3 is on v3) frameworks. That isn't very fair.
2 comments
bGriz 4332 days ago
| You could just look at the link's "Start" page for <5 minutes and see for yourself why it's different enough to warrant existence

Honestly I'm not seeing what's different. I'm working on a hybrid canvas/html5 feature app right now. A good portion of the API (p5js.org/reference) feels, well, typical.

I don't want to discredit the project, it does look nice. You're point about beta is good.

In fairness, this appears to be targeted towards non-programmers, and having been deep in UI for years I may be missing the simplicity sake.

Also, I had no interest in slamming them for a temp broken browser context... rather I'm trying to understand what makes this awesome. In years of browser UIE I hadn't heard of http://processingjs.org/.

link
barkingcat 4332 days ago
Yes, the "processing" refers to the name of a programming language / programming environment originally founded / created by people at the MIT Media Lab.

It is not referring to "processing" anything as a verb, but the name of the programming language outlined at https://www.processing.org

processing.js and this p5js are interpreters for the processing language built in javascript (so that people can write processing scripts in javascript).

You probably haven't heard of it in browser ui/development because it's not specific to the browser.

Many people use it to build interactive art environments both virtually and in the real world (tied to things like servos and light machines, etc) - and a lot of people use it to teach interactive graphics to kids or newcomers to programming.

So it's a totally different thing than what you are thinking of. It doesn't compete at all with any of the graphics libraries because it's for a different purpose.

link
ThomPete 4332 days ago
If anything the community behind processing is sure to make this quite a lot different than D3.

Browse around here and you will see.

https://www.processing.org/

link
bGriz 4332 days ago
| Frankly this is a pretty lazy comment.

I agree and had been revising my comment after-the-fact. Sorry the reddit world showed its face there. Perhaps the really excited guy in the P5 hello video throws me off, because while it might enter competition with existing frameworks it showcases features that have existed through other manifestations.

link