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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

I like processing, and the “p5.js” variant. Schiffman’s coding train videos and “nature of code” (version 2 any day now) are how I learned of it and are really interesting and fun. https://github.com/nature-of-code

I used p5.js to overlay some graphs on a photo I took which ended up in a coffee shop show.

There is value to this and it seems a shame the foundation seems to be miss-managed. I’ve donated in the past and I’m going to have to look into it before doing so again.

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Your comment prompted me to look up the Twitter/X thread. I had no idea that the Processing foundation was suffering from issues of mismanagement to this extent. It is sad to hear :(. I haven't used it for a long time, but I remember doing a few projects in 2007-2008 and appreciating the fact that this language existed. But I keep occasionally returning to it, even if that is the form of watching a random Daniel Shiffman video, e.g., [1], or looking up the gallery [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JzDttgdILQ

[2] https://processing.org/examples

I did some poking too. It seems like they were puttering along with some donations ($165000 in 2018, $275000 in 2020)[1]. 2021 all of sudden they got 10 million dollars..it was crypto donations from artists..[2]so who knows what it’s worth now, if they’ll see another windfall. I can see an organization being befuddled (they hired a finance person). [2]

It makes sense a founder being upset the tech side isn’t getting more benefit. It’s not a good look. Hopefully they can manage it better.

[1]https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/460...

The funding update article:

“The majority of the donations in 2021 came from artists donating cryptocurrency to the Processing Foundation.”

[2]https://medium.com/processing-foundation/processing-foundati...

And, of course, now they aren't accepting crypto anymore to reduce their environmental impact.

Too much authority being given to people that aren't doing things.

They still have crypto wallets accepting donations, Tezos and Ethereum do not have environmental impact today. The blog post was written before the merge.

> It’s not a good look

The look isn't the issue. The fundamental substance is what counts, and it seems terribly mismanaged to not spend most of this money on development and documentation, both of which scale extremely well.

> Hopefully they can manage it better.

Why would I want them doing anything after seeing what they've done so far?

That same document said their policy is to convert crypto to USD, so presumably they didn't suffer from later crashes.

I was about to say that Daniel Shiffman is the only person I sponsor on GitHub, but when I just went to check, I'm listed as a past sponsor:

https://github.com/sponsors/shiffman

Do sponsorships lapse automatically?

In any event, he's amazing and his videos are one of the best ways to get people into code. Very smart, excellent teacher, genuinely wants people to experiment and learn.

If you were paying with PayPal, GitHub dropped support in February. Subscriptions may stop for those who did not change payment method: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-01-23-github-sponsors-wil...

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