{"slug": "processing", "name": "Processing", "category": "editors", "category_name": "Editors and IDEs", "description": "", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 11, "warners": 2, "score": 3.837, "rising": -0.31, "first": "2026-03-03", "latest": "2026-09-25", "why": "noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 4, "compare": 0, "warn": 2}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": "processing.org", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://processing.org", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["Processing"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 797571136, "item_id": 49848196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49848196", "by": "phforms", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It reminds me of the little sketches I made with Processing[1] years ago", "excerpt": "I don\u2019t really mind the inconsistencies, it is just something fun and playful to discover and I believe the imperfections add to the charme of such things. It reminds me of the little sketches I made with Processing[1] years ago, when programming felt like just another artistic medium I could express myself in. [1]: https://processing.org", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ink and Switch interactive homepage"}, {"id": 776897072, "item_id": 48556067, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48556067", "by": "FeteCommuniste", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love Processing and Perlin noise.", "excerpt": "Nice examples, I think I landed on that page quite a while ago. I love Processing and Perlin noise. One thing I enjoyed was using Perlin noise values to compute a \"region\" on the canvas and making the behavior of a particle depend on which region it was in. Examples: https://020406.org/processing/PerlinNoiseBounds1.png https://020406.org/processing/PerlinNoiseBounds2.png https://020406.org/processing/PerlinNoiseBound", "context": "", "use_case": "generative art", "switched_from": "", "story": "Getting Creative with Perlin Noise Fields"}, {"id": 763471264, "item_id": 47716954, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716954", "by": "Brendinooo", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It was great.", "excerpt": "I remember having some spare time at my first job and being really inspired by Ben Barry's work for Facebook's f8 conference: https://v1.benbarry.com/project/f8-conference I ended up learning enough processing to mimic a lot of what he did with the connected dots. It was great. I'd love to get back into this sometime! Gotta have a reason though...", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Generative Art over the Years"}, {"id": 763445040, "item_id": 47715315, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715315", "by": "phlsa", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Reading this makes me want to fire up Processing [1] again.", "excerpt": "Reading this makes me want to fire up Processing [1] again. I remember spending hours and days with it in my early twenties. The immediacy of writing a few simple commands, hitting \"Run\" and seeing graphical output is still unsurpassed and created an almost addictive creative feedback loop that I haven't seen anywhere else yet. [1] https://processing.org", "context": "", "use_case": "Creative coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Generative Art over the Years"}, {"id": 755696162, "item_id": 47231010, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231010", "by": "andai", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!", "excerpt": "People who are making a simple 2D web game don't need an engine, with rare exceptions. Chrome's 30 million lines is plenty of bloat to build on ;) Besides, in this context you're already outsourcing all the code to Claude or Codex or whatever. i.e. a \"programmer\" who has no problem handling the engine side of things. That being said, most enginedev is creative procrastination. Randy's recent video on this is very ill", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Excommunicated Devs Making Games with AI"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 771070082, "item_id": 48191880, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48191880", "by": "WillAdams", "date": "2026-05-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I've tried Processing and Nodebox, and they haven't quite clicked", "excerpt": "I really wish I could find a site for 2D geometry/pedagogy which would \"click\" as well for me, and be as useful as: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ has been. Really miss directly programming in PostScript in Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube. I've tried Processing and Nodebox, and they haven't quite clicked, and scripting in Inkscape feels clunky....", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 763446769, "item_id": 47715423, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715423", "by": "TheOtherHobbes", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible", "excerpt": "I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle. You need a lot of complexity before anything really interesting happens, and Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible. It helped there were people like Jared Tarbell who (IMO) were way ahead of what most people were doing, and were willing to share their code. I wasn't unhappy with some of the r", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Generative Art over the Years"}]}], "who": [{"by": "nsainsbury", "context": "generative artist", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713080", "date": "2026-04-09"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["generative art", "rendering animated videos", "gui graphics framework", "creative coding"], "compared": [{"slug": "p5-js", "name": "p5.js", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47675906", "title": "Generative Art over the Years", "mentions": 4}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842270", "title": "Ink and Switch interactive homepage", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49836374", "title": "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49089600", "title": "Toolcraft", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48522316", "title": "Getting Creative with Perlin Noise Fields", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48166744", "title": "item 48166744", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-04": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 2, "warn": 1}, "2026-05": {"neutral": 1, "warn": 1}, "2026-06": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 797571136, "item_id": 49848196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49848196", "by": "phforms", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It reminds me of the little sketches I made with Processing[1] years ago", "excerpt": "I don\u2019t really mind the inconsistencies, it is just something fun and playful to discover and I believe the imperfections add to the charme of such things. It reminds me of the little sketches I made with Processing[1] years ago, when programming felt like just another artistic medium I could express myself in. [1]: https://processing.org", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ink and Switch interactive homepage"}, {"id": 797392705, "item_id": 49837044, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49837044", "by": "minimaxir", "date": "2026-09-24", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "is open-source and uses Processing", "excerpt": "One important difference between animations/videos generated by Opus 5.5 and the stereotypical AI slop videos is that Opus 5.5 is not a video generation model: it generates and iterates the code and renders it, and there are various ways for it to do so. The code for the infamous \"I'm upping my p(doom)\" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j-hR4fJywU) is open-source and uses Processing: https://github.com/JohnHeib", "context": "", "use_case": "rendering animated videos", "switched_from": "", "story": "Opus 5.5 is good at explainer videos"}, {"id": 785465552, "item_id": 49091597, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49091597", "by": "rtpg", "date": "2026-07-28", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "feels like the design industry has forgotten about things like Processing.", "excerpt": "https://pixelpoint.io/blog/how-to-craft-personal-design-tools-with-toolcraft/ the blog post announcing this > If you need another graphic like that in another place, doing it manually is simply not worth the time. Another problem is experimentation. When you are trying to find the final look, you need to test a lot of small ideas: density, direction, color, spacing, gradients, randomness, shape. The faster you can ch", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Toolcraft"}, {"id": 776897072, "item_id": 48556067, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48556067", "by": "FeteCommuniste", "date": "2026-06-16", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love Processing and Perlin noise.", "excerpt": "Nice examples, I think I landed on that page quite a while ago. I love Processing and Perlin noise. One thing I enjoyed was using Perlin noise values to compute a \"region\" on the canvas and making the behavior of a particle depend on which region it was in. Examples: https://020406.org/processing/PerlinNoiseBounds1.png https://020406.org/processing/PerlinNoiseBounds2.png https://020406.org/processing/PerlinNoiseBound", "context": "", "use_case": "generative art", "switched_from": "", "story": "Getting Creative with Perlin Noise Fields"}, {"id": 771070082, "item_id": 48191880, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48191880", "by": "WillAdams", "date": "2026-05-19", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I've tried Processing and Nodebox, and they haven't quite clicked", "excerpt": "I really wish I could find a site for 2D geometry/pedagogy which would \"click\" as well for me, and be as useful as: https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/ has been. Really miss directly programming in PostScript in Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube. I've tried Processing and Nodebox, and they haven't quite clicked, and scripting in Inkscape feels clunky....", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 767983697, "item_id": 47998981, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47998981", "by": "relativeadv", "date": "2026-05-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "uses the Quil shim for the Processing GUI framework", "excerpt": "\"Forty years later, in September of 2018, I started working on this version of Space War. It's an animated GUI driven system with a frame rate of 30fps. It is written entirely in Clojure and uses the Quil shim for the Processing GUI framework.\" - Robert Martin https://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2021/11/28/Spacewar.html", "context": "", "use_case": "GUI graphics framework", "switched_from": "", "story": "Uncle Bob: It's Over"}, {"id": 763471264, "item_id": 47716954, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47716954", "by": "Brendinooo", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "It was great.", "excerpt": "I remember having some spare time at my first job and being really inspired by Ben Barry's work for Facebook's f8 conference: https://v1.benbarry.com/project/f8-conference I ended up learning enough processing to mimic a lot of what he did with the connected dots. It was great. I'd love to get back into this sometime! Gotta have a reason though...", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Generative Art over the Years"}, {"id": 763446769, "item_id": 47715423, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715423", "by": "TheOtherHobbes", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible", "excerpt": "I spent a fair amount of time with p5 etc, but the results always felt limited and brittle. You need a lot of complexity before anything really interesting happens, and Processing lacks features like gradient fills that limit what's possible. It helped there were people like Jared Tarbell who (IMO) were way ahead of what most people were doing, and were willing to share their code. I wasn't unhappy with some of the r", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Generative Art over the Years"}, {"id": 763445040, "item_id": 47715315, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47715315", "by": "phlsa", "date": "2026-04-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Reading this makes me want to fire up Processing [1] again.", "excerpt": "Reading this makes me want to fire up Processing [1] again. I remember spending hours and days with it in my early twenties. The immediacy of writing a few simple commands, hitting \"Run\" and seeing graphical output is still unsurpassed and created an almost addictive creative feedback loop that I haven't seen anywhere else yet. [1] https://processing.org", "context": "", "use_case": "Creative coding", "switched_from": "", "story": "Generative Art over the Years"}, {"id": 763409282, "item_id": 47713080, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47713080", "by": "nsainsbury", "date": "2026-04-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "making generative art first using Processing, then p5.js", "excerpt": "Fellow generative artist here :waves: I started out in all the usual ways - inspired by Daniel Shiffman making generative art first using Processing, then p5.js, and now mostly I create art by writing shaders. Recently after being laid off from my job, I actually took my obsession further and released my very first mobile app - www.photogenesis.app - as a homage to generative art. It's an app that applies various gen", "context": "generative artist", "use_case": "generative art", "switched_from": "", "story": "Generative Art over the Years"}, {"id": 755696162, "item_id": 47231010, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47231010", "by": "andai", "date": "2026-03-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "noob friendly stuff like Processing and Kaboom is great and highly recommended!", "excerpt": "People who are making a simple 2D web game don't need an engine, with rare exceptions. Chrome's 30 million lines is plenty of bloat to build on ;) Besides, in this context you're already outsourcing all the code to Claude or Codex or whatever. i.e. a \"programmer\" who has no problem handling the engine side of things. That being said, most enginedev is creative procrastination. Randy's recent video on this is very ill", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Excommunicated Devs Making Games with AI"}]}