https://medium.com/processing-foundation/a-modern-prometheus-59aed94abe85

The History of Processing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry

When we started Processing in 2001, the goal was to bring ideas and technologies out of MIT and into the larger world. One idea was the synthesis of graphic design with computer science, combining the visual principles of design with ways of thinking about systems from computer science. We also wanted to share a way of working with code where things are figured out during the process of writing the software. We called this sketching with code. A third idea was to share what we had learned about how to teach programming to designers — to share this beyond the people we could teach directly through our workshops and classrooms. We wanted to spread this as far as we could.