Over at Fell in Love with Data, Enciro has a great interview with Processing guru Miriah Meyer. In the interview they get into some of the best and worst features of the tool, and provide some great insight into how to get started with Processing and what you can expect to get from it.
In short, the best aspect of Processing is the amount of code it takes to get a simple scene with callbacks going — it is a small fraction of what it would take with OpenGL. Simple primitives like circles, squares, text, etc. are nicely abstracted into one-line function calls. Mouse and keyboard callbacks are automatically handled. There is a wide variety of common graphics helper functions available, like lerp-ing colors. Full-screen apps work without having to grab weird OS handles.
via Tools from the Pros #1: Miriah Meyer on Processing — Fell in Love with Data.
