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Comment by th0ma5 | Hacker News Reader

I highly recommend any developer to find a creative coding library and play around. For JS there is P5.js and Processing.js and countless others. For Clojure and Clojurescript there is Quil. Java has Processing, and for C++ there is Open Frameworks.

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Don't forget thi.ng for Clojure! Made by the creative coding legend Karsten "Toxi" Schmidt

http://thi.ng/

Yes, love it, and has changed the way I think about a lot of things!!

toxi is the boss

Any more recommendations for visually interesting JavaScript? I have a kid who is tired of the "just boring text" of Python assignments (things like Project Euler) and wants to start using JavaScript (he can already do static HTML & CSS, but wants to bring it to life with JS), so he can "see cool stuff".

He's already had enough of Scratch, and I don't want a Python graphics library, because it's time for him to add JavaScript to his toolbox (in addition to Python, not instead). He's very artistic (his Photoshop work is amazing), and we both want him to spend the upcoming summer using artistic projects as a vehicle for learning JavaScript programming.

I'll check out P5.js and Processing.js. Any other suggestions or ideas?

I personally really like to just use plain javascript and the canvas API. I found the tutorial on mdn very useful (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/...), and I enjoy the simplicity of not using libraries and tools. I've also used EaselJS, which is also pretty good (but doesn't offer me anything I really need), and PixiJS, which is supposed to be very fast, by using WebGL where possible.

Not super comparable but three.js makes WebGl pretty accessible http://threejs.org

I echo the other voices saying canvas and pure JS (or, in my case, CoffeeScript or ClojureScript). The canvas API is extremely intuitive — aside from the boilerplate setup, perhaps — and you can make some really neat things with it very quickly.

The home page for my personal site has a starfield made entirely with canvas: http://ivanish.ca — best to view in a dark room so you can see all the pseudo-nebulae.

Source code (if it helps): https://github.com/ivanreese/ivanish/blob/master/source/scri...

You might also want to consider Elm, but I have very little first-hand experience with it: http://elm-lang.org

Paper.js is also good:

http://paperjs.org

Why do you recommend this?

Well try some creative coding out and maybe you'll tell me?

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