Lauren Lee McCarthy — p5.js — JavaScript port of Processing

2013

Artists: Lauren Lee McCarthy · Year: 2013 · Medium: JavaScript library — port of Processing for web-native creative coding · Substrate: JavaScript; web browsers; open-source library with extensive community contributions · Place: New York / Los Angeles, USA · Institution: Independent; Processing Foundation Lauren Lee McCarthy began the p5.js project in 2013 at the Processing Foundation, translating the Processing language — Reas and Fry's 2001 educational programming environment — from Java into the then-emerging JavaScript web-standards ecosystem. The goal was explicit: make Processing runnable directly in the browser, with no plug-in, no install, no compilation step. Students should be able to write a p5.js program in a text editor, save it as an HTML file, double-click it, and have it run immediately on any computer. This was a significant technical and pedagogical undertaking. JavaScript's graphics primitives in 2013 (Canvas 2D, the still-new WebGL context, the DOM's Event model) were meaningfully different from Java's AWT. McCarthy had to preserve Processing's pedagogical simplicity — the core sketch structure, the draw() loop, the built-in coordinate system — while mapping everything onto the new substrate. The work took over a year of sustained development; the first production release, p5.js 0.1.2, appeared in April 2014. p5.js has, in the subsequent decade, become the dominant teaching language for web-based creative coding globally. Where Processing (the original Java implementation) was primarily taught in undergraduate art and design programs at institutions, p5.js reaches younger students, self-taught learners, and high-school curriculum. It is free. It runs in every browser. It requires no installation. It is available in a dozen human languages. The entire tutorial infrastructure around it — Daniel Shiffman's Coding Train, McCarthy's own p5.js community pages, the p5.js Contributors Conference — has produced a teaching resource that is now genuinely global. McCarthy's larger practice as an artist (including Someone, 2017, elsewhere in this archive; and the Us, 2018, collaborative data-collection project) runs parallel to her p5.js work. But p5.js is, in a deep sense, her most consequential contribution to this archive: it is the infrastructure on which a substantial portion of the current generative-art world is built. McCarthy is on the faculty at UCLA Design Media Arts and lives in Los Angeles. Lore McCarthy has been explicit that the p5.js project was, from its founding, committed to correcting the specifically masculine demographics of the original Processing community. She directed significant early p5.js community-building energy toward inclusion, documentation in non-English languages, and explicit cultivation of contributions from women and non-binary developers. The p5.js Access Day initiative (2015 onward), which runs occasional hackathons specifically to improve accessibility features, is a direct expression of this commitment. The Processing Foundation (which manages both Processing and p5.js) has a diversity-committed governance structure that reflects McCarthy's influence. She has continued to run the project as a volunteer alongside her UCLA teaching; the paid p5.js development labor has come, over the years, from a rotating cast of contract programmers funded by the Foundation's small grants. Sources • McCarthy, Lauren Lee — Getting Started with p5.js (Maker Media, 2015). • p5.js — p5js.org (library site). • Processing Foundation — processingfoundation.org.