Same reason WordPress is "better" than whatever fancy CMS you prefer. It's accessible. I dislike the Arduino IDE, but it's so underpowered that getting lost in

Same reason WordPress is "better" than whatever fancy CMS you prefer. It's accessible. I dislike the Arduino IDE, but it's so underpowered that getting lost in it is nearly impossible. The variant of C it uses is actually not bad at all for what you end up doing with AVR's. I have looked at Lua and MicroPython and for me the problem is that they do a little too much abstracting away of the hardware. I mean on the one hand, great I can write Python. On the other hand it might not work because you don't have the low level control you need inside interrupt handlers to not screw up your state. As for the pre-processor, well again it's not something most casual users use. I remember looking through WordPress's core code about 10 years ago and there was a statement in there that amounted to variable assignment... but using a damn eval(). Does an average WP user care?