Understanding Creative Coding characteristics: a large-scale scraping and analysis of open-source projects

Creative Coding is an application of computer programming where the goal, rather than having a functional output, is artistic expression. Even when this is the case, its use in advertising, branding, art installations, entertainment and design in general has been growing, and make it a very interesting field to look at, analyze and learn more about. Nowadays, creators publish and share their creative coding projects online. One of the main ways they do so is through the platform OpenProcessing, which hosts more than one million projects. In order to better understand how artists are creating and working in this field, a quantitative analysis was conducted over a set of thirty thousand projects publicly available on OpenProcessing. Static code analyses were conducted on each project and the whole data set to provide insights on various source code metrics, such as lines of code, type of files, most common functions, function variation, complexity and length of the functions, module maintainability, and amount of files per project. This thesis presents the results of such analysis and discusses the main characteristics of Creative Coding projects.