Introduction

I first learned about Processing in high school, back when I was first learning to use Java and wanted to create visualizations of gravitational simulations. Processing struck me as a great abstraction to graphics programming; I didn't want to worry about matrices and buffers to the GPU (not that that knowledge isn't useful), but I wanted to work at a higher abstraction level, with particles and velocities and user interactivity.

Years later, I rediscovered Processing through P5JS, the JavaScript web-native adaptation of the Processing library. No longer was this accessible graphical programming interface bound to the Java runtime (which has portability, scaling, and iteration problems). Instead, in the web browser itself, I could edit the code and instantly see the result alongside; the iteration speed led to a rapid exploratory process of messing with particle systems, noise maps, and other mathematical concepts I found interesting.