Overview \ Processing.org / quote 3 of 4
Sketching is scripting with compiled Java
Processing sketches are made up of one or more tabs, with each tab representing a piece of code. The environment is designed around projects that are a few pages of code, and often three to five tabs in total. This covers a significant number of projects developed to test and prototype ideas, often before embedding them into a larger project or building a more robust application for broader deployment.The idea of sketching is identical to that of scripting, except that you're not working in an interpreted scripting language, but rather gaining the performance benefit of compiling to Java class files. Of course, strictly speaking, Java is itself an interpreted language, but its bytecode compilation brings it much closer to the "metal" than languages such as JavaScript, Python, or Ruby.