I read a lot of Ben's code while I was working on the IDE for Arduino. It was always extremely clear, robust, and well-commented. And occasionally hilarious. My favorite part was the prompt to take a walk that showed up when you had created a new sketch for each letter of the alphabet on a particular day (sketch names defaulted to something like 20231003a, 20231003b, etc). But there were also some good digs at the failings of Processing's various dependencies, like Java and Mac OS.
The world of computational design and open-source software is much better for having Ben Fry and Processing in it.
On days I'm looking for inspiration I revisit that day in mind or visit benfry.com to see what other cool projects he's been working on. Thank you Ben for your amazing contributions to data visualization programming and for being an inspiration to an aspirational hacker.
I learned to program in Python but at the time (around 2005 say) it wasn't easy to create python gui apps that didn't involve a fair bit of boilerplate. When I first downloaded Processing I was immediately hooked. It was amazingly interactive, with top notch documentation and examples. It contributed a lot to me becoming a programmer.
Also shout outs to Fluxus which is pretty sweet too,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus_(programming_environm...
> This year, the proposed Foundation budget is around $1.2 million. But for Processing, there is budget for just two people: one developer, one community lead.
It's interesting, because I got very interested in Processing after being blown away by what an amazing asset Daniel Shiffman is for the coding/educational community, and wanting to find out more about it. When I went to go look into processing a bit more, I was very confused by what I encountered. It seemed like a radical political group with an absolute fixation on identity politics, which just happened to have a couple of programming platforms in the mix. Very sad to see that this wasn't just the superficial impression, but where the money is actually going.
Shiffman, meanwhile, not only is an excellent engineer and communicator, pumping out an endless stream of content...sadly seems to have been doing so despite the organization. The man is a legitimate saint. The way that you get people interested in engineering is by making engineering fun and accessible, which is exactly what he does. I wish the best for him and the work that he does, and I hope that he gets to continue putting what he does out there with or without the help of processing. Processing and p5js, as well as their machine learning library ml5js, also deserve better; they're great too.
I had no idea that they had a 'foundation' let alone this big. The list of people in the about section has me pondering 'why'.
I never knew that a foundation based on donations could stray off the path so far as to make the original founders uncomfortable enough to quit.
I wish them well and I hope that they start a new foundation where money can go instead. Money walks.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy always applies:
----
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
-----
That news had many defending the foundation, saying that their other projects get equally low funding. However, it makes me wonder how these foundations would fare in terms of income if they didn't use the name of a popular open source project. It's likely that a lot of donors have the misconception that their money goes to the namesake project - this is especially true for Mozilla.
I used p5.js to overlay some graphs on a photo I took which ended up in a coffee shop show.
There is value to this and it seems a shame the foundation seems to be miss-managed. I’ve donated in the past and I’m going to have to look into it before doing so again.
It makes sense a founder being upset the tech side isn’t getting more benefit. It’s not a good look. Hopefully they can manage it better.
[1]https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...
The funding update article:
“The majority of the donations in 2021 came from artists donating cryptocurrency to the Processing Foundation.”
[2]https://medium.com/processing-foundation/processing-foundati...
https://github.com/sponsors/shiffman
Do sponsorships lapse automatically?
In any event, he's amazing and his videos are one of the best ways to get people into code. Very smart, excellent teacher, genuinely wants people to experiment and learn.
https://medium.com/processing-foundation/processing-foundati...
Rich people unironically using a term like that is pretty laughable.
(I mean, if a donor doesn’t have Ethereum, then they are probably not going to buy Ethereum in order to donate. If they only have Ethereum, then they need to transact it anyway to get a currency that the foundation will accept… And that’s taking it for granted that Ethereum has some problematic environmental impact, and that the impact is important enough to warrant losing donations for.)
The funding doc reads like an organization that has lost its way and is pursuing various vague social causes (“decolonizing wealth”), or social justice wars, rather than its original mission.
> I was soon shocked to learn that the Foundation spent nearly $800,000 last year. $0 of that went to Processing 4. [...] This year, the proposed Foundation budget is around $1.2 million. But for Processing, there is budget for just two people: one developer, one community lead.
Basically he feels like the donation money should go towards further development of Processing itself, but the foundation seems to be spending it on other stuff, and not on continuing or accelerating the development of Processing itself.
> Every year, we support and sponsor programs that nurture diverse communities and their projects. Our programs include:
* A Fellowship and Teaching Fellowship Program that funds exploratory, creative, and technical research
* An Advocacy Program that partners with organizations for projects
* Public events that provide platforms for collaboration between our contributors, such as panels and talks that spread the word about the need for equity in these fields
* Summer programs to support emerging coders throughout the world
[1] https://processingfoundation.org/
EDITed: linebreaks
"We invite you to meditate on digital fragmentation and infrastructure that lays its foundation through the global white capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist framework we live in today through our Land and Digital Acknowledgements."
tl;dr: divisive nonsense
https://processingfoundation.org/
Every year, we support and sponsor programs that nurture diverse communities and their projects. Our programs include:
A Fellowship and Teaching Fellowship Program that funds exploratory, creative, and technical research
An Advocacy Program that partners with organizations for projects
Public events that provide platforms for collaboration between our contributors, such as panels and talks that spread the word about the need for equity in these fields
Summer programs to support emerging coders throughout the world
Other bits:
We invite you to meditate on digital fragmentation and infrastructure that lays its foundation through the global white capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist framework we live in today through our Land and Digital Acknowledgements.
Please consider donating to the Processing Foundation to help us advance the role of programming within the visual arts.
I guess the foundation money is mostly being spent on things unrelated to Processing itself. But, if this is what the people donating the money wanted to happen, who's to say that it's wrong? Or maybe nobody really knows what they wanted. It's a tough issue with nonprofit organizations because they can often just spend the money on whatever the management wants, which may not be what the donors or former management wants.
Meh. It depends.
Sometimes, like in the case of Mozilla, people are mislead about what their donations are used for. "Donate to firefox" money goes to the Mozilla CEOs favourite political causes.
I'm assuming that in this case, due to the snipped you posted, donators are made aware that they are not donating to Processing development, but to the leaders' political causes.
It could be that many of Processing's donor's had the assumption it was being developed as a creative coding tool (which I think its excellent as). As far as being a tool to introduce programming, I don't think its bad, but there are better tools/approaches. Personally, I think starting with whatever the browser interprets is very accessible, and is very relevant to modern programming. Start with HTML, CSS and eventually move to turing-complete things, like Javascript. Don't jump right into Java or even Javascript.
Perhaps it’s because I am an European, but I’m really astonished by the widespread diffusion of this kind of obtuse ideological furore in the US lately, especially in the academic world
I seriously admire his dedication to processing all these years, this must be tough!
According to their FY2021 990 filing, they had $442k of "other" expenses.
It seems like they're required to disclose what those expenses are on the Schedule O form if they exceed 10% of all expenses, which they do, but I don't see the expenses enumerated there. (edit: oops, now I see)
I am, err, not a tax professional so I stopped here..
Looking at the About section, and the people involved [1] there appears to be at least a misalignment between the purely technical (?) vision of the tweet and the much wider remit of a foundation that he started years ago.
Things change, priorities move on. Is there something rotten here as rather vaguely implied? Perhaps, but it's possible there is just a disappointment at the child choosing a very different path to that desired by the parent.
And he said that's no better than what they had prior the foundation when him and Casey were working on Processing. That he started the foundation in the hope to scale up development.
Now, I have no idea what they could have allocated money on, isn't it sole purpose to further develop Processing? But my guess is they are doing outreach, grants, and other stuff like that, as opposed to further development. But that's just speculation on my part.
An org which usually potters along turning over small figures receives $10M USD in crypto in 2021, specifically 2021? You tell me.
Is there? Why do they need to be aligned? The foundation is aligned to who's in charge of it "today". If those mentioned in the tweet are no longer in some sort of control they can't expect it to go the way they "wish".
The whole thing is a vague lashing out without clear detail of what the exact criticism is or whether it is fair.
Wow, didn't realize it was a thread with more info. Not logged in, it only showed me the first tweet in isolation. No thread, comments, nothing.
An aside, I don't use Processing very often but every time I've dipped into it I've found it simple and enjoyable.
Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. There are tens of thousands of students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists who use Processing for learning and prototyping.
Why do you need a language to learn to code when you can just... learn to code in one of the more simple languages then switch later to something more complex such as Java? Python's pretty simple to get started with.
The Arduino thing came later, the language and tools (IDE, etc) was quite mature by then.
Talent and technology based progress is no longer compatible with non-profits or academia.
The actual technology, the actual tools made by actual talent that made coding easier and accessible have done a million times more for democratizing than any non-profit talk, grant or fellows program could ever do.
The Foundation and it's farcical work can only exist with the Processing code base, but without the code the Foundation is nothing.
Processing using since the Proce55ing days.
On edit, thanks for the nitter links!
I seen links to tweets, but there were never any replies or continuation of the thread. I didn’t know if it was locked or Twitter was broken or what.
So strange it doesn’t say “Join to access 8 more posts in thread” or “login to see 50+ replies” or something.
Calls to action don’t work if I don’t know I’m being called to action.