Interview with Processing Creators Fry & Reas
Rhizome has an interesting interview with Ben Fry and Casey Ras, inventors of the Processing language. Above is a demo of the Roots Multitouch Installation, written in Processing by Jordan Hochenbaum, Owen Valis, and Memo Akten.
Did you ever think of calling it anything other than Processing?
CR: Not when we started the project, but we’ve second-guessed the name many times since. First, it was an iterative name with the characters always changing: Pr0ces5ing, Proc3ss1ng, Pr0c355ing, etc. Then we more conservatively started using Proces55ing before we released the alpha version. We made the decision to move to Processing a few years later. I regret not calling it Seal. I really wish we would have called it that, with a cute animal balancing a keyboard on his nose as the mascot. I think Ben wanted to call it Bagel or Potato.
BF: Now he’s just making fun of me. The Processing name originally came from a journal idea that Casey and I were talking to MIT Press about. We wanted to write about computational work and the process and ideas behind it, melding reprints of old writings by people like Vannevar Bush with more contemporary thinkers and creators. Neither of us had the time to make the journal happen but the Processing name stuck as we began talking about this other project.
[via Rhizome.org]
