What makes Processing useful for such visualizations? Haven't really looked at it, but the tutorial here [1] begins with rendering images and then combining them into a gif, which seems a bit awkward?
Making gifs with processing is (weirdly) one of the more painful exercises in the framework. Kind of baffling, given the goals of the project.
Regardless, the best thing about processing is that it makes getting the first pixels on the screen extremely easy. Like two lines of code. In normal Java that’s a highly nontrivial exercise with lots of incidental complexity and boilerplate.
For creative visual work, just getting something on the screen and then iterating quickly is the key. It keeps the ideas flowing.
Processing has a lot of useful primitives for drawing and animation as well, combining them into interesting patterns is very straightforward. On top of that the documentation is really well done, it’s written in a very accessible tone and it has tons of useful examples.
py5 is a version of Processing for Python 3.8+ that is well integrated into the Python ecosystem. It connects the Processing Jars to Python using JPype. If you like Processing, please give it a try!
Oh nice! I enjoyed reading Nature of Code when it launched on Kickstarter over a decade ago, but the barebones IDE and the Java heritage always turned me off. And p5.js was, well, Javascript. I spent some time porting some of the functions to Python, but realized to make it useful it'd be a bigger effort than I had time and skill.
Py5 looks awesome! Will give it a try soon. Thanks for your work!
ps: I noticed you're using JPype to connect to the Java Processing libraries. Very smart.
> I spent some time porting some of the functions to Python, but realized to make it useful it'd be a bigger effort than I had time and skill.
Getting py5 off the ground started during pandemic lockdown and took many months. Managing the source code is best done computationally, with py5generator creating the actual py5 source code.
Nice! Thanks for creating that, I just finished a small processing project that involved a lot of array and data structure manipulation and that kind of work odd really unpleasant in Java, especially when compared to python. Better gif creation is excellent too.
If I was writing production grade software, I wouldn't have used Processing for the client. But for the purposes of an academic project, where a backend-type like me wanted to draw some pixels without too much fuss, it was perfect.
He's just saving the output as an extra, but when you run the sketch you can see it displayed as well.
> What makes Processing useful for such visualizations?
You have a bunch of useful primitives to draw stuff on screen immediately, without having to go through all the troubles that this entails with a normal programming language. It's really fun!
[1] https://bleuje.com/tutorial1/