Processing is a programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound. It is used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an open-source alternative to commercial software tools in the same domain.
The beta software for Processing 1.0 was released 20 April 2005 and can be downloaded here. Processing is free to download and available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry (Broad Institute) and Casey Reas (UCLA Design|Media Arts). Processing evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab.
Using John Maeda's electronic sketching software DBN as a stepping stone, I taught myself Processing while a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh and incorporated it into my thesis Processing Capoeira: Dance Game Fight Code. The next year, I had the forture to participate in a Programming Mobile Media workshop led by Casey at Italy's Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
Electrical and Software engineers may also find Hernando Barragan's IDII thesis Wiring especially interesting.