John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), has written a long article in the MIT Technology Review on how he recalls the Processing programming language and development environment taking shape in the creative hands of Ben Fry and Casey Reas.

"Processing was written and developed by two boys next door who are also visual and computational geniuses. Fry and Reas wrote it for themselves--and also for the world at large, to help everyone share in the rich vocabulary of computational expression. Processing exemplifies my core belief about education today: let the new generation do their thing and just get out of their way. Download it today, and play."

During his time at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy [where I worked as well], Casey Reas crafted the Processing tool, also with the help of many of the Institute's students - a fact that is mentioned in a comment by Victor Zambrano ("argonaut").

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Photo: Casey Reas uses Processing to create high-resolution photographic prints. "This image was generated by thousands of autonomous software agents carrying out their instructions," he explains. "Shapes are drawn as they intersect-the size and colors are determined by the agents' behaviors." Credit: Casey Reas/Bitforms Gallery, NYC