The project was initiated in 2001 by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, both formerly of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab.

The foundation encourages people around the world to meet annually in local events called Processing Community Day.

[9] This means that the use of static variables and methods in classes is prohibited unless Processing is explicitly told to code in pure Java mode.

In 2005 Reas and Fry won the Golden Nica award from Ars Electronica in its Net Vision category for their work on Processing.

The award statement says: "Drawing on a background in graphic design and computer science, Ben Fry pursues a long-held fascination with visualizing data.

As Principal of Fathom Information Design in Boston, Fry develops software, printed works, installations, and books that depict and explain topics from the human genome to baseball salaries to the evolution of text documents.

With Casey Reas, he founded the Processing Project, an open-source programming environment for teaching computational design and sketching interactive-media software.

The project was later run through a partnership between the Mozilla Foundation and Seneca College, led by David Humphrey, Al MacDonald, and Corban Brook.

It combines the core ideas of Processing — learning to code in a visual context — with Python's readability to make programming more accessible to beginners, educators, and artists.

[20] Spde (Scala Processing Development Environment) replaces Processing's reduced Java syntax and custom preprocessor with the off-the-shelf Scala programming language which also runs on the Java platform and enforces some of the same restrictions such as disallowing static methods, while also allowing more concise code, and supporting functional programming.

[26] Processing has also been used to create illustrations for publications such as Nature and The New York Times, to output sculptures for gallery exhibitions, to control huge video walls and to knit sweaters.