My first class at MIT’s Media Lab was also Ben Fry’s and, for that matter, John Maeda’s — who was teaching it.

John convinced us that the central technical problem facing us as young “art geeks” (his term) was how to turn Java into a viable platform for experimental digital art. Java (which was in 98 synonymous with applets) needed to render faster, load faster and work consistently enough to run on John’s machine at the head of the classroom — none of which Java seemed willing to do at the time.

John assumed that we’d just figure it out before the end of the first week. We were convinced he was right because he appeared to have organized a whole course predicated on our early success. John was at his most powerful as a mentor when he had only the slightest idea of what he was doing.

Nearly 10 years later Processing (co-instigated by Ben) solves the problem that we just hacked through then, and solves it for good. It ends the matter. Both in the technical sense: how to get applets to render fast, start fast and work more often than not — and in the broader sense: how to make it something that you’d teach a class around. Its architecture, its language design, its scope, and its ambition all make sense if considered a spiritual descendant of this “first class”.

All this was brought back to me this afternoon as I wrote the “plugin” that tells Field — our digital art development environment — how to work with Processing. The integration turned out to be quite tight and quite easy to write and it’s working very well: you can access the core Processing classes live, without a compilation cycle, using both Python and the rest of Field’s programming support. It looks like it will make it into the beta release.