going to dig now
ps: i htink i got the idea of the math, it always cuts me the first time, maybe i have to type faster…

Processing is definitely not that bad, I know many estimated people and friends using it. The point is basically that when you do OpenGL stuff the programming language works as a wrapper, so the performances will depend mainly by your Video Card. Of course code optimization at some point matters. You are right, Ruby is known as not being that fast and Java could be faster sometimes. It’s true also that they both use an interpreter but as you have noticed embedding the interpreter for Ruby is way liter/easier, difficult to compare to the JVM.
So I was very impressed by this “simplicity” of Ruby, of course easy to find in modern languages. My interest in it though is not only related to create standalone applications, I’m interested also on the mixture between OOP and dynamic languages to explore new frontier of productivity (Ruby on Rails is an example).
I won’t definitely leave Processing, especially if we consider that after what happened recently the possibility to generate standalone applications from P5 becomes closer, and of course I look forward that!

i’ve been brainstorming with similar problems recently, i’m actionscripter but already want to escape the limits of vector graphics and was looking deeeply into Processing as the more powered graphics-oriented language (that’s how i found your blog). aslo i need to do a project next months that needs to work with mysql as well – flash cant

and then… i saw this your text and started rethinking… is processing very limited. what i don’t like in it is that i can’t compile to exe, and it runs in java – that i understand as small UI window sizes and processor overloading. so i was happy to read that you’ve been there and you’ve found Ruby (and Phyton but didn’t like it so much) so i started reading about Ruby and it’s amazin language, but there are things i didn’t like in it too.
you say it compiles to bytecode, but i didn’t find any info for that, it runs in VM just like java (and there is a wrapper to make it into .exe but all it does is puts all scripts libraries etc into one file and again runs the VM)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_programming_languages

also here http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4sandbox/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=ruby&lang2=java
it says that ruby is way slowlier in calculations/operations (nearly all) than java (what Processing compiles to) so i start thinking that Processing is actually not that bad compared to Ruby but maybe better. somewhere i’ve read about ruby that the best way to use it for heavy applications is to write it all there as it’s easy to make the ideas work and then the parts that perform heavily to wrerite in C. i believe nothing works as good as compile-to-binary C but i’m not going to learn it

so i’d love to hear your comments
i hope i got the math right this time
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