Toxi aka Karsten Schmidt has been playing productive troublemaker the last few days, blogging some loose thoughts about what kind of tools and ideas are needed for a productive evolution of the computational design field. To roughly summarize: He is critical of the current state of the generative / computational scene, and the tools that are being hyped. Among his criticisms is that the work that is currently popular in the scene is often focused on immediate gratification, duplicating already existing work. It also often found lacking in niceties like software design, or even a more general understanding of good coding practices.

Karsten used Processing as the basis of his statements, pointing out that the procedural syntax of Processing could educate lazy coders and ultimately a dead-end for serious users of the tool. Not surprisingly, this has caused an explosive (but not incendiary) discussion over on the Processing forums. Ultimately, the discussion deals with the theoretical foundation for a tool like Processing, but also with possible future directions for the project. It’s on the techy side, but relevant for anyone who fancies her/himself a coder or who wants to understand what makes a programming language/tool capable of maximum freedom of expression.

Be sure to also read Karsten's followup where he clarifies his position after some misunderstandings.