Dan Shiffman's youtube channel "The Coding Train", his books and website - are really great introductions/tutorials to general programming, creative programming, natural language analysis, machine learning and a whole bunch of other topics. He has this ability to make technical-sounding (or actually technical) concepts and projects interesting, non-scary for beginners (and non-math background people) and fun. In my view - his books & videos are prolly the best introductions to programming for kids and people who have a fear of programming.

If you read the various blog posts and interviews - the history of Processing at his department (NYU Tisch ITP) had a purpose of encouraging 'creative' people to explore and gain an exposure to programming.

All link to above can be found on his personal site - http://shiffman.net/

> Processing (from which p5 takes its inspiration) has an explicit goal of being beginner friendly. I was first introduced to it in an art class.

openframeworks.cc is a vastly superior library IMHO (C++ though) for serious visual work.

Processing already has a JS port which can be used both with Javascript and a Java like language ( http://processingjs.org/ )

The book http://natureofcode.com which is a good starting point for creative coding uses ProcessingJS

processingjs.org hasn't been updated in years, and the java-to-javascript interpreter is full of quirks.

With p5 you can get as close to the metal as you can in JS (for example, it has a WebGL based renderer if you want, and you can use typed arrays for your data). So it's a lot better.

Regarding OF: yes, for computationally intense stuff it's a lot faster, a native OpenGL application written in C++ should be faster than using JS in the browser.

However, it's also a lot more painful to develop in IMO. I tend to work out my sketches in p5js these days, then when I need performance port it over to OF. Given that most of the time the performance bottleneck is either "how many particles" or "how high-res is the input video", testing in p5 is a simple matter of scaling down.

their webgl is completely broken and unusable. do not use it for webgl at all, use other libraries like threejs.

Can you explain how it's broken for you? The examples work just fine in all of my available browsers, but I know that's only a limited sample:

https://p5js.org/examples/3d-sine-cosine-in-3d.html

It also uses p5!