Processing - a programming language

[telstarmagikistferrari]

the other day I was at a bookstore and found a book that has really consumed my attention since. It's about Processing, a vaguely named but super interesting programming language that reminds me of ChucK in a lot of ways. Instead of audio/synthesis, it involves creation of visual images and animation. See the website: processing.org. Basically you create code, hit the 'play' button, and it renders visually the code you've typed. I post this here to call attention to any Chuck-ers that are interested in a visual analogue to what ChucK does. I'm just getting started with it, with the books' help, but for a primarily visual artist (me) it really is intuitive. Check it out!

[Inventor]

I believe that you can link ChucK and Processing together as well, possibly with OSC...

[Kassen]

I accidentally have been looking into Processing and trying some simple code in it in the past days to celebrate getting a new laptop with a decent graphics card.

It's a lot like ChucK in that the goals (art, education...) are very similar, it's free&open, cross platform and it borrows from Java. It would certainly make a very good play-mate for ChucK, at least until GLucK arrives.

I also like how it has extensive and practical documentation.

What I didn't like so much was the focus on drawing objects to the screen each frame, as opposed to creating objects, keeping track of them, and drawing the result of that to the screen. The Processing "box" object doesn't seem to be treated as a "object" on the code level. maybe that was done to keep things simple but so far it's not a perspective that feel very natural to me.

i think i'll instead spend a few days with Fluxus again ( http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/ ). Fluxus is also free&open, unlike ChucK or Processing it's mainly a DIY project without big university backing but it's growing up quickly. The syntax is very different, based on Scheme instead of Java/C++. It does treat objects as objects, it can even hand them to a internal physics engine to -for example- have easy gravity and collisions. Another nice thing is that you can modify running programs without a re-compile as one of it's aims is livecoding. Scheme is quite different from ChucK syntax though, it's a lot more like Lisp, the first time you use something like that it can feel a bit like your brain gets turned inside out. It's powerful though, at least once you get the hang of recursion.