Medium is such a garbage site these days. So I open this article in Safari 12 on Mac, and I am unable to scroll. Nothing floating above the content that I can see, but it just wouldn't scroll. I wish people would stop using this shite. There are much better alternatives out there.

The absurd is, a few years ago Medium was seen as a hope for change in a sea of bad sites. Now it's one of the most glaring example of bad sites.

On that subject: There's an article on the front page right now, from a company's blog (and domain), and the page starts with "Medium uses browser cookies to give you the best possible experience. To make Medium work, we log user data and share it with processors. To use Medium, you must agree to our Privacy Policy."

What if I don't agree with Medium's policies or terms of service? I can't even read a company blog without having to consent to some unrelated company's terms? Medium in general is just consuming all web content, and when they make changes (or break scrolling, as per your comment), they take everyone's blogs with them.

Everyone's ceding control of their blogs and articles to Medium, and for what?

Was it never a garbage?

I really don't get the point of it.

There was a time when, at least to me, it represented a clean way to read high quality articles. Now, whenever I open an article, I wonder if I'd be bombarded with float shit, or something else non-functioning, or general slowness (it's a text site that crawls). These issues didn't exist in the past.

What are the better alternatives?

Static HTML. Seriously.

Processing got me into programming in University while studying design and kicked off my (too-long) transition to full-time software-development. It's an awesome tool and I'm happy to see it is still going strong. To somebody looking for a little more advanced, but still approachable variant, I can highly recommend OpenFrameworks, which is C++-Based.

Wow, this is excellent! Processing was definitely my introduction to graphics programming, and I think it's still the most effective tool in teaching certain programming concepts. The visual feedback loop is huge for getting people off the ground.

In 'creative coding' classes, I think a big missing piece is an easy way to collaborate on and share scripts, and this is a perfect tool for that.

Many congrats to the creators!

Proce55ing (remember its original name?) is today's LOGO.

It's a fantastic way for people to approach programming in a very visual and progressive way.

When P5.js first came out, I was skeptical. But today with the power of javascript, I think it's just as fine for most applications.

Seymour Papert just rolled in his grave. Processing is great but it's far far from actually designed to teach programming. It stumbles into that rather than purposely gets there.

This paper goes over just some of the things wrong with Processing. Skip all the cool stuff on that page and just concentrate on the critiques of Processing

http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/

This is a really interesting critique that is hard to disagree with. But, what would be an interesting alternative that doesn't have such problems?

There isn't... as much as I love Bret Victor's work, Processing is out there today teaching people how to code so I take any criticism of it with a very large grain of salt.

Until someone puts the work into implementing some ideas from Learnable Programming, Processing is one of the best we have.

This reminds me of OpenProcessing which has similar support for "playing with Processing" in an editor and hosting your projects. You make an account, and then share your projects, view others', play around, etc. OpenProcessing appears to currently do more to facilitate teaching and educational projects using Processing.

- https://www.openprocessing.org/

All in all, it's great to see the community around Processing and p5js keep building and continuing to be a positive force to make programming, focused on creative design, more accessible.

That's a cool site, and some of those top sketches are insane, but does the editor really not let you code and preview side by side? I can't even find a quick shortcut to switch between the two. While that site looks a lot cleaner in general, that alone is a no-go for me.

Are there any context sensitive help, tooltips, etc ?

Seeing two function definitions, my first inclination was to run them on the next two lines, via

  setup();
  draw(); 

So that was wrong.

Ok, so the functions run themselves automagically.

Guessing that there must be line and circle functions, I managed to get those running.

How do I discover new stuff?

Shift - Tab is not doing anything over function signatures(Jupyter can do that in the browser sort of ok).

What would a total newbie do next without going over to Help tab?

It has a lot of great features but for some reason people seem to consider this primarily a beginner tool.

Is it just the fact that it's easy to use that makes it only for beginners? Surely there are some people who are serious about visual or interactive programming that could take advantage of it?

I've used it for a few professional freelance projects back when I was just starting out during high school/university. The projects typically involved communicating with an Arduino running some physical hardware and displaying some info on a screen/doing very simple control flow (an interactive installation in a conference).

It's great for that kind of a simple thing, but starts to fall apart when you need to do more advanced user interaction - you have to build a lot of stuff from scratch, or at least you had to back then. Also I feel that a lot of the primitives have been optimized for ease of learning rather than what's best for professional code.

It would still be my go-to tool for similar Arduino based projects that just need a quick simple good-looking interface.

I think one of the things that makes a language have a for beginners bias against it is that a great amount of code is written in it by beginners just trying to get some cool shit done, and then when professionals look at the code in the wild they develop a negative opinion.

To change a negative opinion like that once developed you need real language evangelists, like Crockford was for JavaScript.

Awesome. Always good to see new stuff from the processing crew.

Does the latest versioning of P5 support webgl2? I really love the project, but had to move away some time ago due to lack of support.

hmm, so this or glitch or codepen? Good to have so many good alternatives I guess...

Processing is a programming language specialized for producing visual art. Its standard library includes functions for drawing 2D and 3D objects as well as taking user input.

P5.js is a JavaScript port of this standard library, allowing one to use similar syntax as Processing but in the context of a <canvas> element.

P5.js Web Editor is a web editor to allow one to create using P5.js without downloading anything. Therefore, this is more like Codepen, but for the specific purpose of creating visualizations and not normal webpages.

Love the accessibility features even though I don't need them. Yet.

the main page at p5js.org uses a tonne of CPU, might want to have a look at that