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Ben Fry resigns from the Processing Foundation (twitter.com/ben_fry)
210 points by eat_veggies on Oct 4, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 118 comments



So very sad. Ben Fry is one of my heroes. He's done an amazing job with Processing, over a very long time. I can't think of any other open-source project with the same consistency of vision and quality of execution, plus the level of design and usability.

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.


Agreed. Ben, although he doesn't know it, is one of my biggest inspirations for what I do. Back in 2005 or so he did a presentation to my class at the GSD on his genome visualizations. I was blown away, but even more so when I asked him what language he works in and he said Processing. I said I was unfamiliar with Processing and he said, "Oh, I wrote it." Mind. Blown.

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.


One common query on HN is "what's the equivalent of the Conmodore 64 in this day and age? how will the next generation of hackers learn?" For me, it was largely Processing and Arduino.

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...


> It was a strange experience; 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.

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.


Daniel Shiffman is on the Processing Board of Directors though. He is one of four member of the board. So I'd assume to some extent he's part of the disagreement with where the money is spent, but that's speculation, cause Ben Fry did not mention anyone in particular.


This is sad. I was just thinking days ago, as I revisited Processing, how consistent it has been at being Processing. Sure, development has been rather slow but at least it's not overwhelming to come back to.

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.


It is actually fairly normal for foundations to go off the rails unless there is tight control.

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy always applies:

    ----
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":

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.

    -----
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html


How Jerry Pournelle got kicked off the ARPANET:

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/text/pourne-smut.html


Thank you for preserving and sharing that little bit of history.

"The Internet is for those that agree with us" has a long tradition.


It wouldn't actually be so bad if they just came out and said it like that, but it's always accompanied by some weirdly non-sequitur equivocation word salad 'justifying' the ban or whatever and it always resolves (painfully) to the same thing: 'it's not censorship/fascism/bad when we do it.'

The jannie urge to mop has surely got to be genetic


Jerry Pournelle had absolutely no right or entitlement to use the ARPANET or MIT-AI lab's computers, and he was a drunken parasite making belligerent threats, breaking the MIT-AI Lab's rules, and violating DOD policies.

The resources he was abusing were not publically available at any price, commercial use of the ARPANET was officially banned, and he had no right to use it, while he was personally and commercially benefiting from the MIT-AI Lab's generosity, which he scorned in public.

He blatantly violated both the word and spirit of the MIT-AI Lab Tourist Policy, as well as ARPANET and DOD policies against commercial use:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/mit-ai-lab-tourist-policy-f73b...

>Unfortunately, we must reserve the right to terminate tourist accounts for any reason, although we hope this will not be necessary. The most likely reason would be if a tourist or tourists were to interfere with the laboratories’ research objectives, i.e. do not interfere with other people who are using the system.

>The ITS computers are not an infinite resource and we must establish priorities for their use. Their primary purpose is to support faculty, staff and students in their endeavor to carry out MIT’s Sponsored Research. While tourists are expected to contribute to MIT’s research objectives, they are unlikely to be in the mainstream of the on-going work and should therefore consider their role and use of the MIT ITS machine a privilege. A tourist should at all times conduct himself or herself with this in mind. The most important principle is that tourists should not interfere in any way with a laboratory member’s use of the machine. This means that a tourist should not do anything which annoys other users, and also that he should not use the computer resources when a laboratory member needs them.

>[...] Any use of the MIT ITS machines for personal gain, profit making enterprise, or political purposes is not a legitimate use of the Laboratories’ computer resources.

>These specific statements of policy give a minimum of how a tourist ought to behave to be a responsible user on the MIT ITS system. They are not a complete list of all the ways tourists should or should not behave. Just because some particular anti-social behavior is not listed does not mean that it is acceptable. What a tourist should do is cultivate a good attitude: make a positive effort to anticipate and avoid actions that would interfere with other users. If you cannot tell whether a certain course of action can interfere with any one, find out from someone else before trying it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

>A 1982 handbook on computing at MIT's AI Lab stated regarding network etiquette:[92]

https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41180/AI_WP_2...

>It is considered illegal to use the ARPANet for anything which is not in direct support of Government business ... personal messages to other ARPANet subscribers (for example, to arrange a get-together or check and say a friendly hello) are generally not considered harmful ... Sending electronic mail over the ARPANet for commercial profit or political purposes is both anti-social and illegal. By sending such messages, you can offend many people, and it is possible to get MIT in serious trouble with the Government agencies which manage the ARPANet.

Why are you so butt-hurt on his behalf? What ever happened to personal responsibility, and what's wrong with kicking him off after he broke the rules and violated the law? He not only richly deserved to be ordered off the net, but he also literally demanded it:

"I find this thoroughly distasteful. If you have some authority to order me off the net, do so. If not, leave me alone." -Jerry Pournelle

They certainly DID have some authority to order him off the net, so he got exactly what he demanded and deserved. It was poetic justice, and his sputtering apoplectic reaction threatening to inform the House Armed Services Committee was as priceless as the ARPANET access he lost due to his own asinine words and illegal misbehavior:

"One thing that is known about ARPA: you can be heaved off it for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense. Of course that was intended to anger me. If you have an ARPA account, please tell CSTACY that he was successful; now let us see if my Pentagon friends can upset him. Or perhaps some reporter friends. Or both., Or even the House Armed Services Committee." -Jerry Pournelle

Jerry Pournelle was heaved off the ARPANET for being a flaming alcoholic asshole who shouldn't have had ARPANET access in the first place, because he was abusing it for personal gain and commercial purposes: promoting his SF books and his Byte Magazine column, not for supporting the policies of the Department of Defense!

"Think of it as evolution in action." -Jerry Pournelle

The whole affair was a triumph of Social Darwinism, and couldn't have been more deserved! ;)


That's a good post, reflects well on you, please never delete it.


I'm glad you hate it so much you'd resort to sarcastic reverse psychology and psychological projection, carrying the water for Jerry Pournelle, instead of having any rational counter argument. Why don't you try telling your friends on the House Armed Services Committee about how I'm abusing the Internet?


Pournelle didn't lavish the janny with many lines, seems like a good example to follow.

Remember in my first comment I used the phrase 'weirdly non-sequitur equivocation word salad' - that's your comment history, that is.


I read something about the Linux Foundation that indicated it is also straying quite far from the expected path as well.


The news is that TLF spent just 3.2% of its funds on the Linux kernel. It dwindled from a paltry 3.4% in the previous year. Meanwhile, Linux developers are giving up on their LTS kernel due to lack of resources.

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.


The LTS kernel change appears to be lack of senior maintainer bandwidth.

This is not, in my experience, the sort of problem that could be solved by throwing money at it.

(and by "in my experience" I mean situations where I was involved with that shape of problem, and could have arranged to have money thrown at it, and the eventual decision was that that wasn't the limiting factor)

Note that this is entirely separate to the question of whether what TLF is doing with its money is suboptimal - it probably is - but I don't believe from what I've seen that the LTS kernel situation is downstream of funding decisions.


They've been a money train for a very long time now, and at some point started going ultra-woke as well. Last I checked they were demanding what can only be described as "woke loyalty oaths" from people that wanted to speak at one of their conferences.


I like processing, and the “p5.js” variant. Schiffman’s coding train videos and “nature of code” (version 2 any day now) are how I learned of it and are really interesting and fun. https://github.com/nature-of-code

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.


Your comment prompted me to look up the Twitter/X thread. I had no idea that the Processing foundation was suffering from issues of mismanagement to this extent. It is sad to hear :(. I haven't used it for a long time, but I remember doing a few projects in 2007-2008 and appreciating the fact that this language existed. But I keep occasionally returning to it, even if that is the form of watching a random Daniel Shiffman video, e.g., [1], or looking up the gallery [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JzDttgdILQ

[2] https://processing.org/examples


I did some poking too. It seems like they were puttering along with some donations ($165000 in 2018, $275000 in 2020)[1]. 2021 all of sudden they got 10 million dollars..it was crypto donations from artists..[2]so who knows what it’s worth now, if they’ll see another windfall. I can see an organization being befuddled (they hired a finance person). [2]

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...


And, of course, now they aren't accepting crypto anymore to reduce their environmental impact.

Too much authority being given to people that aren't doing things.


They still have crypto wallets accepting donations, Tezos and Ethereum do not have environmental impact today. The blog post was written before the merge.


> It’s not a good look

The look isn't the issue. The fundamental substance is what counts, and it seems terribly mismanaged to not spend most of this money on development and documentation, both of which scale extremely well.


> Hopefully they can manage it better.

Why would I want them doing anything after seeing what they've done so far?


That same document said their policy is to convert crypto to USD, so presumably they didn't suffer from later crashes.


I was about to say that Daniel Shiffman is the only person I sponsor on GitHub, but when I just went to check, I'm listed as a past sponsor:

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.


If you were paying with PayPal, GitHub dropped support in February. Subscriptions may stop for those who did not change payment method: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-01-23-github-sponsors-wil...


Here is the Processing Foundation's 2022 Funding Update:

https://medium.com/processing-foundation/processing-foundati...


> Decolonizing wealth

Rich people unironically using a term like that is pretty laughable.


The part about turning off donations via Ethereum due to concerns about “environmental impact” was pretty good too.

(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.


This is the place you park the trust fund babies who are too dumb to be entrusted with running a real business.


The interesting part is:

> 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.


To be frank, the donors likely think their donor money should go towards further development of Processing itself. That's why they're donating to THAT foundation


Not really. Processing Foundation today is much wider than just the Processing software. A lot of people interact with Processing Foundation through workshops, teaching and p5 without ever touching the original Processing software.


My read is that no money went to the development of P5 as well. I think he refers to Processing as all of it's versions, so the Java and JavaScript based variants. But maybe that needs some clarification from him.


I was a board member at a small arts non-profit. Honestly one of the things we really struggled with was how to handle volunteers when we were paying some people.

We decided to go all volunteer, as it seemed like it would make it easier to ask members to help out. (avoids the why are they getting paid and not us..?).

But with a very small anual budget (very low 5 figures) per year, most of which was from member fees, and almost all of which we spent on our public and free event. paying people wasn't an issue, we just couldn't.

With the spike in donations the foundation got, it becomes way more difficult to manage. Especially since it was a volunteer effort for the most part before 2021. I see some obvious overhead (maintaining p5.js online editor/ toolkit. etc..) but I also see echos of the "why is this valuable and worth paying for but not that"...


I can see that for some non-profit with more nebulous goals, but as a user of Processing, I'd assume all the foundation does is just further development, maintainance, bug fixes, and like managing the bug reports, the announcements on the website, and all that.

And maybe some work to market the foundation itself and try to increase the donations to it.

So really my expectations would be that it takes the money, and hires people to expand Processing, P5js, and the editor with new features, fix bugs, and maybe branch it out to new platforms. And it would maybe hire some people to manage the community issues.

And then the foundation members could discuss amongst themselves about what features are most important, if the editor needs more work this year, or if P5js needs more, or if they want to invest in a port to Rust, or whatever.

But it seems that there's a lot more money going towards things like outreach, grants to artists, events, workshops, etc.

I feel it goes against what I'd expect as a potential donor. And I feel it's also against what Ben Fey expects of the foundation.

He said himself:

> the project was always a 50-50 split between internal (software development) and external (the community, the documentation, examples, etc). The Foundation has lost all sense of balance

Implying that Software Development has almost spotted completely, and it's now all things around community building.


>A lot of people interact with Processing Foundation through workshops, teaching

This work touches probably less than 1% what P5 and Processing do yet takes up the majority of the budget seemingly.


p5js is one of the most popular toolkits today for teaching creative coding and is used across schools and universities all over the world, so education and community outreach has become a huge part of the ecosystem. “Processing” as a global and worldwide community would not exist today if the only focus of the budget was on the original Java software.


P5 is what I mostly use. How much of the budget did P5 get, how many developers are there?

My argument is for spending money on making software that affects millions not spending it mostly on fellowships that affect 12 people or workshops and talks that affect 40.


> p5js is one of the most popular toolkits today for teaching creative coding

How much of the budget was p5js support/development assigned, how many developers are currently working on it, how many man/hours of development have gone into it over the past two years?


Anyone knows what the "other stuff" is?


From the main page of [1]

> 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


The usual racket


I'm under the impression that a 501c3 _can't_ spend its money on developers working on FOSS while being 100% tax deductible because of the US tax code; makes one wonder whether it would be worthwhile to lobby/organize to get that changed.


Can you elaborate as to how you arrived at that conclusion?


Naively, because it might help more pro-social and FOSS software get made?


Thats... what? Is that a reply to my comment or just markov chaining?


They believed you were asking why they thought it might be useful to lobby for a change in regulations, not why they thought there was a regulation in the first place


Odd


From: https://processingfoundation.org/

"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


Yeah it’s really bizarre. It reminds me of times when I’ve gone to a charities website and things start getting weird and eventually I realize it’s run by some religious cult. Sucks though, seems like at a certain point you should just be honest that you are more interested in social issues so that people who want to support the actual development of processing know your foundation isn’t the way to do so.


>should just be honest that you are more interested in social issues so that people who want to support the actual development of processing know your foundation isn’t the way to do so.

That's a feature, not a bug.


> at a certain point you should just be honest

Yeah but then nobody will give you $10M in crypto


I don’t know tbh I’d assume those people donate because they made some money off of the work done on processing and want to give some back to keep development going. I’d think if you wanted to donate to the stuff they’re on about you’d find a non profit specifically for that purpose. I’m sure there are plenty and they’re probably better at it than a software foundation haha.


Yeah, on further examination it looks like a lot of NFT artists created work using processing and have kicked it back, which explains why the donations were so crypto-heavy. It was giving odd vibes for a bit but it seems cool.


It's right there on the homepage. What more do you want?


I read the whole thing and Jesus Christ this is atrocious. Can’t imagine what it feels like to found a framework that became a driving force behind “creative coding” and watch it taken over by indoctrinated zealots who don’t care about the craft and the art of programming, and waste resources on social posturing.


Ironically, not paying the producers and maintainers of the code is classic capitalism.


It reads like it was written by a person who does not seek to divide.


Sounds like commie gobbledygook to me.


This comment has strong 1960s vibes.


It's likely invoking Norm MacDonald (who used this phrase humorously when Sara Silverman was explaining what a "comedy collective" was)


It's a reference to Norm Macdonald


I think DEI initiatives.


The only way to prevent a new crisis from happening is to create a second Foundation, safeguarding the initial objectives should the first Foundation veer off-course. But for that we need two Ben Frys.


Prerequisite: discover psychohistory.


And hope for no Mules.


From the Processing Foundation website:

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.


> But, if this is what the people donating the money wanted to happen, who's to say that it's wrong?

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.


I don't think spending the money on these outreach programs is wrong either. I will say it does show conflict in terms of what the Processing foundation should focus on.

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.


> global white capitalist, colonialist, and imperialist framework

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


The silliness has been dying down lately, fwiw. This feels like a bit of a time capsule from a few years ago.



Thanks for this! I've been going crazy for months that Twitter threads and replies are totally broken if you are logged out (which I always am since deleting my account in December). And now Nitter has led me to LibRedirect[1] which not only automatically redirects Twitter links but also lots of other common links like TikTok.

[1] https://libredirect.github.io/


Thanks for sharing, this looks great! Shame it is not available on Firefox for Android yet.


Neat! I wish there was a web version of LibRedirect. Would then be easy to make a DuckDuckGo Bang! for it, so we could do "!<bang> <original URL>" in DDG in any browser without installing an extension first.



I met Ben when he visited UCSB in 2004 or so to demo Processing. I was a dummy and thought my own visualization app was "better" and didn't pay much attention to him or talk with him after.

I seriously admire his dedication to processing all these years, this must be tough!


So it seems like it was a mistake to let go of control of the foundation as one of the original founders? But if you have to (I see there were health reasons), doesn't a foundation have a charter, where one could put the intention that e.g. 50% of funds go directly to software development, or something?


Just as an informational point, it's generally highly discouraged for foundations or non-profits to have board members (the ones that have the legal control) take a salary as it creates a conflict of interest that's hard to work out of. So if you help found a non-profit, raise money, and then want to do it full time, a lot of times you'll invariably lose control — and there's good governance reasons for that, but it definitely matters who the board ends up being.


So what is the foundation spending money on?


Propublica has a nonprofit explorer (similar to Guidestar, but free) and tax filing viewer here: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...

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..


Out of their $443,020 expenses in 2021, the biggest line item expense was $187,262 for "CONSULTANTS." Their next biggest was $169,383 of merchant processing fees. It will be interesting to see their Form 990 for 2022, which is presumably the "last year" Ben Fry is talking about..


Damn, that's what? Do I need an MBA to understand why they'd need to spend on consultants and merchant processing fees?


The merchant fees are probably just credit card or crypto fees from then accepting donations.


gas


developers, especially developers that work with a large contributor base on open-source projects, often get paid by non-profits under a consultant label


Ah, right you are! I completely missed that.


It’s easy to miss, the 990 is a maze! I just happened to get lucky – my work had me doing a project on 990 data recently.


This is sad. I loved Processing and Ben Fry's work. I hope the current board of the Processing Foundation can be ousted and that the donations wont be wasted away anymore. This is a sad state of affairs and I hope Ben can find new joy


Yet another example how perverse foundations turn out to be, and FOSS isn't immune to such things.


I've stopped all institutional donations. Never again in this political climate. Only specific projects, events, or Substack/Patreon support for individuals.


It's not really clear from the thread what the complaint is though there is an implication of misspent or wasted funds.

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.

[1] https://processingfoundation.org/people


The criticism seemed pretty clear. He said that last year 800k was spent, and none of it went into development of Processing itself. And that next year they plan to spend 1.2 million, and of that, only 2 developers are planned to spend any time further developing Processing.

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.


The purpose of the foundation has grown wider than the original Processing software, and encompasses things like p5js and its editor.


Your comments above seem to be implying that Ben’s concerns are only about investment in the original Processing software. Is this the case? Are there more devs being funded to work on p5js?


yes. they have been funding fellowship projects and grants for p5 more than Processing for years. Ben is just mad that Processing gets less funding but p5 has waaaaay more active users and is used more frequently in mission aligned contexts (education)


> something rotten here as rather vaguely implied

An org which usually potters along turning over small figures receives $10M USD in crypto in 2021, specifically 2021? You tell me.


> 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.

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".


Yes, but that's partly the point I was making.

The whole thing is a vague lashing out without clear detail of what the exact criticism is or whether it is fair.


Agreed. More clarity would help.

Maybe he wanted to start drawing a salary in order to resume working on Processing again, and the board said no. (That isn’t my first guess about what’s happening, based on the highly polarizing content on the foundation’s website but the thought did cross my mind.)


> It's not really clear from the thread

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.


For those not logged in to twitter, Ben is also on a Mastodon instance

https://information.garden/@benfry/111176713441913283


This is Processing, as in the Arduino development environment? Or something else.


Processing [1] is a language (/ ecosystem and IDE) that serves a lot of creative use cases, particularly creative graphics projects. Arduino re-used the GUI of the Processing IDE to build the Arduino IDE, which is called out on the startup splash screen for the latter, and is probably what you're thinking of.

An aside, I don't use Processing very often but every time I've dipped into it I've found it simple and enjoyable.

[1]: https://processing.org/


Processing is very cool, especially if you like graphics.

https://processing.org/

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.


And imo up till now the original Java flavor of Processing has been maintained very well! They've kept up with Java versions, done an Apple ARM port, added modern conveniences like debuggable shaders and a library to run ONNX ML models, and improved GPU performance with each major release. I'm concerned about this changing if the current maintainers are leaving...


What does it do that Jupyter - which is used by millions of people, not tens of thousands - doesn't and why does it need a foundation?

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.


Processing is different beast. It’s a framework, not a coding environment.

Processing is Java + sophisticated graphics and animation capabilties: you create a canvas and you can then draw to it. It has a bunch of functions and libraries for use by artists and graphics people. It’s solid and performant. And there is a Python mode these days if you like significant whitespace.

p5.js is Processing ported to JavaScript.


Yeah I see I was too cynical here. Processing and p5 seems legit. The weird aura of social justice word salad emanating from the foundation is kinda tainting it with BS.


It has a simple and sane IDE, drawing API and overall environment (including builds and plugina) that's pared down to be cruft-free but very full-featured. Their flavor of Java is preprocessed to be easier to work with, e.g. no classes are required, you can write rect(10, 10, 20, 20); in an empty file and hit run and a rectangle will show up on screen. Things like simple game programming are extremely easy to dip a toe into.

Python tends to really suck for stuff like that as a beginner, because you immediately butt heads with the terrible package management/library situation and why does the pip installer crash with an unhelpful error message and what the hell is a virtualenv vs conda vs pipenv and oh also why does every one of those install scripts crash and ohmygod I just want to draw a line and I see advice like https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844... screw this I'm out.


It started as a different thing. A language to quickly prototype (mostly graphical) concepts. A sort of Flash for Java as well ...

The Arduino thing came later, the language and tools (IDE, etc) was quite mature by then.


Heartbreaking news and sad some suspicions I had a while ago are being confirmed.

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.


Mere mortals can't see past the first "tweet" in a thread, so is there any more to Ben Fry's message?

On edit, thanks for the nitter links!


Oh is that what’s been going on recently.

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.





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