John Maeda (Casey and I’s former advisor) has written a very gracious, and very generous article about the origins of the Processing project for Technology Review. An excerpt:

In 2001, when I was a young MIT faculty member overseeing the Media Lab Aesthetics and Computation Group, two students came up with an idea that would become an award-winning piece of software called Processing—which I am often credited with having a hand in conceiving. Processing, a programming language and development environment that makes sophisticated animations and other graphical effects accessible to people with relatively little programming experience, is today one of the few open-source challengers to Flash graphics on the Web. The truth is that I almost stifled the nascent project’s development, because I couldn’t see the need it would fill. Luckily, Ben Fry and Casey Reas absolutely ignored my opinion. And good for them: the teacher, after all, isn’t always right.

To give him more credit (not that he needs it, but maybe because I’m bad with compliments), John’s objection had much to do with the fact that Processing was explicitly an evolutionary, as opposed to revolutionary, step in how coding was done. That’s why it was never the focus of my Masters or Ph.D. work, and instead has nearly always been a side project. And more importantly, for students in his research group, he usually forced us away from whatever came naturally for us. Those of us for whom creating tools was “easy,” he forced us to make less practical things. For those who were comfortable making art, he steered them toward creating tools. In the end, we all learned more that way.