To Processing I








Peyton’s piece on Josef Albers.


Screen Shot 2017-08-26 at 11.08.35 AM








Here is the structure of the revised nested for loops:




Here is what the myshape function looks like:






Published by

Vince Matsko


7 thoughts on “To Processing I”

  1. Dear Vince,

    I am a Sage developer and a CoCalc user, and I too am fully committed to open source and interested in interactive ways to teach Math and computer science. I completely understand your decision and would never try to convince you otherwise. This said, I find some of your wording at the beginning of the post a bit confusing and would like to clarify as to not let people think that using Sage is a paying service!

    Indeed, Sage is not CoCalc! Your first sentence “Sage (now called CoCalc)” would suggest otherwise. Sage is (and always will be) a free open-source math software that anyone can download for free on and install locally on their machine. CoCalc was called “SageMathCloud” until last May and changed its name, in particular to avoid confusion with Sage. Cocalc is an online platform that provides, among other things, an online access to Sage, which is indeed very convenient for teaching (because then, students can use it directly without installing it).

    But there are other ways… For example, Sage now uses Jupyter notebooks. Everyone is free to install a “JupyterHub” on a server with a Sage kernel which then allows students to connect and play around with Sage. Of course, this requires to have an access to a server and all the technical maintenance which comes with it…

    Another thing is that CoCalc itself, even though it offers paying subscription, is also open-source. This means that, in theory, it is possible to install and maintain a Cocalc server somewhere else, not run by the Cocalc company. Of course, this is technically highly non trivial. But this is not impossible: we are actually exploring this possibility at my university right now.

    In the meantime, we have decided to use some of our fundings to pay Cocalc subscriptions. One reason is we want to support the project: we probably would not if it was no open source.

    In any case, as I said: I am not trying to convince you to change your decision. Probably, you knew all this already. But reading your post, I was not 100% sure and I felt it might be confusing for your readers.

    Good luck with your class!


  2. > But why was I reluctant in the past? The issue is that of user space versus screen space.
    It is not clear from article…
    1. The reason to abandon Sage is “user space versus screen space” or “low performance & servers being potentially unavailable”?
    2. Does Processing look fast in comparison to Sage?
    3. Does Processing have free of charge 100% available servers?
    4. Or you run it offline? In that case, why not run Sage offline?


  3. Thank you for all for your comments and questions! I don’t think this is the appropriate forum for a debate on these issues, but I am including all comments so others can make a well-informed decision if they are considering a software choice for their own courses. For me personally, this is the third semester I’ve taught my Mathematics and Digital Art course, and I feel it has run more smoothly since I’ve converted to Processing. Likely everyone’s experience will be different….


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