Released by John Maeda in 1999, Design By Numbers (DBN) had the most direct impact on Processing. (In fact, it’s fair to say that there would be no Processing without DBN.) This minimalist language was created to be accessible to designers and artists and it works very well to introduce ideas of programming to that audience. Two other innovative ideas were integrated in DBN. First, the programming environment could be embedded into a web page so that it could be access for free, by anyone with a Web connection. Second, a web-based courseware application was integrated into the software to allow students to upload their assignments to a server where the public could see their work and look at their source code.

Processing’s emphasis on teaching came from our experience working with Prof. Maeda on DBN. We were so impressed with how quickly a beginner could start writing programs. Initially, we were interested in melding the idea of “sketching” in code with the pedagogical aspect of DBN. While working on DBN, Ben developed several experimental versions that included other programming languages (Python and Scheme) and drawing features (color, changing the window size, magnification, movie recording, and even OpenGL support), but it was clear that these did not make sense for the DBN project because they interfered with Maeda’s intention of a simplified programming language and environment.