How Processing And P5 Got Newbies Into Coding

What the creators of Processing — now 20 years old — did right

Two weeks ago I posted a little web toy I’d made —a machine for doodling using a line that only turns in right angles. I made it using P5, which is one of my favorite coding languages, because it’s created explicitly for the purpose of making creative, artsy stuff.

I’m a hobbyist coder. Half the time when I write software it’s for a “productive” purpose — like creating web scrapers for my journalism.

But the other half of the time? I’m just … screwing around. I make odd creative projects, like poetry-generation bots or little procedural animations (like that one above), or tools for visualizing the world in curious ways (like my punctuation-remover app). I’m not being “productive”; I’m having fun, using code to create art that employs the alien qualities of the machine: Its ability to be utterly precise, and to repeat things over and over to an extent that humans would find numbing. Honestly, this weirdo creative coding brings me as much joy — maybe even more — than when I write scripts to do something practical and work-based.