
Hello P5.js Web Editor - juliendorra
https://medium.com/processing-foundation/hello-p5-js-web-editor-b90b902b74cf
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LeoNatan25
Medium is such a garbage site these days. So I open this article in Safari 12
on Mac, and I am unable to scroll. Nothing floating above the content that I
can see, but it just wouldn't scroll. I wish people would stop using this
shite. There are much better alternatives out there.

The absurd is, a few years ago Medium was seen as a hope for change in a sea
of bad sites. Now it's one of the most glaring example of bad sites.

~~~
pjmlp
Was it never a garbage?

I really don't get the point of it.

~~~
LeoNatan25
There was a time when, at least to me, it represented a clean way to read high
quality articles. Now, whenever I open an article, I wonder if I'd be
bombarded with float shit, or something else non-functioning, or general
slowness (it's a text site that crawls). These issues didn't exist in the
past.

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citeguised
Processing got me into programming in University while studying design and
kicked off my (too-long) transition to full-time software-development. It's an
awesome tool and I'm happy to see it is still going strong. To somebody
looking for a little more advanced, but still approachable variant, I can
highly recommend OpenFrameworks, which is C++-Based.

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ebspelman
Wow, this is excellent! Processing was definitely my introduction to graphics
programming, and I think it's still the most effective tool in teaching
certain programming concepts. The visual feedback loop is _huge_ for getting
people off the ground.

In 'creative coding' classes, I think a big missing piece is an easy way to
collaborate on and share scripts, and this is a perfect tool for that.

Many congrats to the creators!

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keyle
Proce55ing (remember its original name?) is today's LOGO.

It's a fantastic way for people to approach programming in a very visual and
progressive way.

When P5.js first came out, I was skeptical. But today with the power of
javascript, I think it's just as fine for most applications.

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tokyodude
Seymour Papert just rolled in his grave. Processing is great but it's far far
from actually designed to teach programming. It stumbles into that rather than
purposely gets there.

This paper goes over just some of the things wrong with Processing. Skip all
the cool stuff on that page and just concentrate on the critiques of
Processing

[http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/](http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/)

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warpech
This is a really interesting critique that is hard to disagree with. But, what
would be an interesting alternative that doesn't have such problems?

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whywhywhywhy
There isn't... as much as I love Bret Victor's work, Processing is out there
today teaching people how to code so I take any criticism of it with a very
large grain of salt.

Until someone puts the work into implementing some ideas from Learnable
Programming, Processing is one of the best we have.

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dpflan
This reminds me of OpenProcessing which has similar support for "playing with
Processing" in an editor and hosting your projects. You make an account, and
then share your projects, view others', play around, etc. OpenProcessing
appears to currently do more to facilitate teaching and educational projects
using Processing.

\- [https://www.openprocessing.org/](https://www.openprocessing.org/)

All in all, it's great to see the community around Processing and p5js keep
building and continuing to be a positive force to make programming, focused on
creative design, more accessible.

~~~
ehsankia
That's a cool site, and some of those top sketches are insane, but does the
editor really not let you code and preview side by side? I can't even find a
quick shortcut to switch between the two. While that site looks a lot cleaner
in general, that alone is a no-go for me.

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sireat
Are there any context sensitive help, tooltips, etc ?

Seeing two function definitions, my first inclination was to run them on the
next two lines, via

    
    
      setup();
      draw(); 
    

So that was wrong.

Ok, so the functions run themselves automagically.

Guessing that there must be line and circle functions, I managed to get those
running.

How do I discover new stuff?

Shift - Tab is not doing anything over function signatures(Jupyter can do that
in the browser sort of ok).

What would a total newbie do next without going over to Help tab?

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ilaksh
It has a lot of great features but for some reason people seem to consider
this primarily a beginner tool.

Is it just the fact that it's easy to use that makes it only for beginners?
Surely there are some people who are serious about visual or interactive
programming that could take advantage of it?

~~~
MuncleUscles
I've used it for a few professional freelance projects back when I was just
starting out during high school/university. The projects typically involved
communicating with an Arduino running some physical hardware and displaying
some info on a screen/doing very simple control flow (an interactive
installation in a conference).

It's great for that kind of a simple thing, but starts to fall apart when you
need to do more advanced user interaction - you have to build a lot of stuff
from scratch, or at least you had to back then. Also I feel that a lot of the
primitives have been optimized for ease of learning rather than what's best
for professional code.

It would still be my go-to tool for similar Arduino based projects that just
need a quick simple good-looking interface.

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james-mcelwain
Awesome. Always good to see new stuff from the processing crew.

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debacle
Does the latest versioning of P5 support webgl2? I really love the project,
but had to move away some time ago due to lack of support.

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xchaotic
hmm, so this or glitch or codepen? Good to have so many good alternatives I
guess...

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applecrazy
Processing is a programming language specialized for producing visual art. Its
standard library includes functions for drawing 2D and 3D objects as well as
taking user input.

P5.js is a JavaScript port of this standard library, allowing one to use
similar syntax as Processing but in the context of a <canvas> element.

P5.js Web Editor is a web editor to allow one to create using P5.js without
downloading anything. Therefore, this is more like Codepen, but for the
specific purpose of creating visualizations and not normal webpages.

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tomcam
Love the accessibility features even though I don't need them. Yet.

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plaguuuuuu
the main page at p5js.org uses a tonne of CPU, might want to have a look at
that

