“Having the icon be basically the play button was a big innovation of the friendly language of Processing. It isn’t ‘compile’—it’s ‘play.’”
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Dan Shiffman, Associate Arts Professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, reminiscing on
Processing’s origins with co-founders
Casey Reas and
Ben Fry. “That was intentional,” explains Reas in
Eye of Design’s “oral history” of the creative coding language. “If you were learning computer programming at that time you were doing classes in a computer science department. You were only working with text and math.”