Casey Reas: Hi, every­body. I’m Casey. I want to keep my com­ments fair­ly brief. The idea is to go back a lit­tle bit in time. I’m going to share some of the orig­i­nal ideas when we first were start­ing Processing.

We go back to 2001. What were the ini­tial goals at that time? Why did we start mak­ing Processing. We had two goals that were work­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. One was to bring these real­ly pow­er­ful ideas from com­put­er sci­ence into the dig­i­tal arts, and also con­verse­ly to bring ideas from the visu­al arts into the tech­nol­o­gy com­mu­ni­ty. I think the largest goal there, one that’s very aligned with what we’re talk­ing about today, that’s one of access and mak­ing it pos­si­ble for more peo­ple and peo­ple who think dif­fer­ent­ly to have access to these pow­er­ful ideas [in?] programming.

One of the fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences we were think­ing about at the time is between learn­ing how to use soft­ware and how that’s dif­fer­ent from learn­ing how to cre­ate soft­ware. When you learn how to use soft­ware, you’re using soft­ware as a tool. When you’re cre­at­ing soft­ware, you have a very pow­er­ful way of think­ing at your dis­pos­al that allows you to build web sites, to make video games, and that’s think­ing about soft­ware more as a medium.

The way that you think about soft­ware affects the kinds of things that you can do. Traditionally you would learn com­put­er pro­gram­ming through oper­at­ing on math, or oper­at­ing on lan­guage, and in order to bring these ideas into the visu­al arts we decid­ed to build a cus­tom lan­guage that allowed peo­ple to have visu­al expressions. 

We were [ini­tial­ly?] influ­enced by a lan­guage called Design By Numbers, which was start­ed by John Maeda. There was a lot of work that was hap­pen­ing pri­or at MIT in the Visual Language Workshop, and in the Aesthetics & Computation group. The time in 2000 is very dif­fer­ent from now, and Design By Numbers was a project that allowed peo­ple to begin writ­ing their pro­grams very ear­ly on, with­in the con­text of an [inaudi­ble].

At the time you could write C++ pro­grams, and for exam­ple this is a pro­gram that’s extreme­ly and far too com­pli­cat­ed for pro­duc­ing this result, draw­ing two tri­an­gles. That was one thing we were work­ing against, hav­ing code like that which was real­ly dif­fi­cult to parse and under­stand, to pro­duce a real­ly sim­ple visu­al result:

The oth­er thing that we were work­ing against were tools that were made for design­ers and artists. We felt that tools like this from around that same time made it easy for peo­ple to get into pro­gram­ming, but as your ideas grew and as you became more of an expert, these kinds of envi­ron­ments were lim­it­ed and did­n’t real­ly allow the work to grow with your ideas.

So we start­ed Processing as a way of bring­ing ideas in the visu­al arts into the pro­gram­ming cul­ture. The idea was to build a new cul­ture with­in the visu­al arts around what soft­ware could do.

And this is the sta­tus of where it is right now. We do things like talk about col­or, we talk about typog­ra­phy, we talk about shapes. But at the same time we intro­duce these core ideas of soft­ware: vari­ables, flow, repetition.

At Processing’s tenth anniver­sary, we made a list of what we felt were the most impor­tant aspects of the project, in a way the things that we’ve done well.
So, pro­gram­ming with­in the visu­al arts con­text.
We made it explic­it­ly for edu­ca­tion and learn­ing.
We felt it need­ed to be a bridge to oth­er lan­guages. So for exam­ple, as a first lan­guage, you could build on top of it and use oth­er kinds of pro­gram­ming languages.
To have an infra­struc­ture for edu­ca­tion, the kinds of tuto­ri­als and exam­ples that were needed.
And that we devel­oped it through the com­mu­ni­ty and through teach­ing. It was built through a dia­logue with peo­ple who were using it.
That it was sim­ple to share. Exporting so peo­ple see the work, and you could share the work with your com­mu­ni­ty and with your friends.
And that we had an infra­struc­ture that allowed peo­ple to dis­cuss, work togeth­er, to ask ques­tions to each oth­er, and real­ly tried to build the kind com­mu­ni­ty where peo­ple felt welcome.
Then that it’s exten­si­ble; you can extend it and build on top of it.
That you can use it for bring­ing dif­fer­ent media in and tak­ing dif­fer­ent media out.
And that it was min­i­mal, mean­ing that peo­ple could be very com­fort­able with it from the begin­ning, but it would scale with your ideas.

That was about five years ago, and here’s a chart show­ing how Processing’s grown. The num­ber of peo­ple using Processing on a month­ly basis, from January 2006 to January 2015. The dips in there are when the school year begins and ends. You can see that it’s heav­i­ly tied to the aca­d­e­m­ic calendar.

If we take this list of ten things, which I think is clear, but it’s also a lit­tle bit too involved, I think now in 2015 we can real­ly great­ly sim­pli­fy this into these three points:

1. Diversity. I’m real­ly great­ful to Lauren and Johanna for tak­ing the lead­er­ship in this area. Having a direct con­ver­sa­tion about diver­si­ty, class, and gen­der with­in the Processing project. It’s new; this is the begin­ning of that, and we real­ly look for­ward to learn­ing through this dis­cus­sion and bring­ing that foward.
2. The idea of access has always been a part of Processing from the very begin­ning, but we’re inter­est­ed in bring­ing that for­ward in more depth.
3. And then the con­ver­sa­tion around free soft­ware, mean­ing free as in free­dom, libre, and libero soft­ware. It’s been a part of Processing but it’s nev­er been an explic­it part of the mes­sage. I think talk­ing about how Processing and projects like this and com­mu­ni­ties like this are very dif­fer­ent from the Adobes and Autodesks and Microsofts of the world. It’s anoth­er part of our edu­ca­tion [ini­tia­tive] we’re going to embark on.

With that lit­tle bit of back­ground [inaudi­ble] Johanna to talk about the present and future goals of the project.