gravityboy's Journal - Sat, 29/12/2007 - 11:30pm
I've been taking a little bit of time away from Debian and X to see what sort of fun stuff is out there that I've been putting off learning. Aside from finding what looks to be a good fitness training plan for the next year (and hopefully beyond), I've been looking at different programming languages. One that I found most recently is
Processing.
This program is absurd amounts of fun to play with. I've long been interested in how to do display complicated data sets visually, and processing is really built to allow you to do that relatively easily. More and more often in my work lately I've been generating fairly large data sets, and I'm not really satisfied with the standard graphs that come with a spreadsheet. They work for basic data, but they completely fall down when you need something bigger. You can either add more graphs or just have a large table, both of which are suboptimal. Processing is centered around the concept of sketches, quickly where you quickly type some java code in to the IDE, hit the play button, and have it run. The API is very simple and should be intuitive to anyone who's done any coding before. This lets you play around with how to visualize your data at very low cost.
The software is GPL'ed, and while it relies on java, this shouldn't really be a problem in the near future. Unfortunately, java is java, and to be honest I'd rather be writing something like python or ruby. Options for those seem to be forthcoming (
nodebox is apparently being ported to linux and
scribble is out there in some form now) but processing has an impressive and easy setup as it is. I'll definitely be picking up one of the
new books when it's available.