One thing that struck me as odd was that the author apparently is not an experienced programmer, but she tried to learn Python from the tutorials designed for experienced programmers; she saw that there was a list of tutorials for non-programmers, but she "didn't look at any of those". Why not?<p>One possible answer is that the term "programming" means something somewhat different to the author than it does to, for example, me. When I look at the Python tutorial topics, even those for non-programmers, I see stuff that looks like programming: loops, conditionals, generators, etc. But the author apparently saw a lot of stuff that didn't seem to have much to do with what she was interested in: getting the computer to do something cool. Processing apparently gave her an easier way to do that.<p>To me, getting the computer to do something cool, in and of itself, is not necessarily "programming". For example, the beginner's tutorial for Processing that the author links to tells you to type the following into the editor: "ellipse(50, 50, 80, 80);". This, of course, draws an ellipse. Cool! But this, to me, isn't "programming"; it's just invoking a magic incantation to get the computer to draw an ellipse. "Programming" is what the person did who wrote the code that interprets that line you typed and figures out what to draw and where.<p>It's quite possible that this is just me; maybe most people are OK with using the word "programming" to describe something that doesn't seem like programming to me. But word choice aside, I am <i>not</i> trying to say that only what I call "programming" is worth doing. I think the point is more that maybe "programming" is too narrow a term to describe what many people are trying to do when they want to get the computer to do something cool.