I am new to programming “PC applications”.
I have some experience with programming MCUs in C and ASM and a tiny bit of knowledge about C++ ( I love the concept of custom objects / classes, so useful for handling lots of data!).

I started messing around with processing recently because I while C++ is really powerfull, it is very hard for a beginner like me to create something other then “terminal applications” from scratch. GUI is really hard and weird …

So I looked for other “languages” or “systems” that offered GUI functions but still were “beginner friendly”.
That’s when I discovered processing.
Yes, the “IDE” is a bit weird to get into if you ar used to things like CodeLite, VisualStudio or Atmel Studio, but it is really easy to use.
And there are tons of documented examples!
And even some nice libraries for GUI elements!
Yes, it is java based, but who cares, right?
(I don’t get why almost everybody hates java, so far I had no problems with it. But that doesn’t mean anything since I am just doing some very “basic” stuff …)

Since my experience with programming is very “low level” and “hardware oriented”, I sometimes struggle with the “abstractness” of “programming PC applications”.
(Where are my interrupts, why can’t I just access the control registers of the CPU, read/write directly to memory or to and from the connected devices, … )
But having GBs of RAM and memory is a nice change to only having a few kBs of RAM, maybe like 1MB of “programm memory” and clock speeds of around 16MHz.
It’s nice to just be able to create huge arrays with thousands of elements and not having to worry about assigning memory space “by hand” …

Eventually I am planning to “combine” processing and my MCU programming “skills” and create something like a custom home-automation system with a PC-UserInterface based on processing since it seems to be pretty easy to read and write data to/from a serial port with processing.

So, here I am …