Agreed. Same with Arduino and C++. If you buy a random developer board you have to also buy a programmer and learn the tool chain. This is an unnecessary barrie

Agreed. Same with Arduino and C++. If you buy a random developer board you have to also buy a programmer and learn the tool chain. This is an unnecessary barrier for dabbling around to see µC are interesting to you and you can still learn the principles about µC I/O. Even for professionals this can be interesting for prototyping (heh, not because JS is prototype based). Even with no perfectly efficient code modern µC are very powerful while using basically no energy. Their example processors are already very powerful and certainly can run a small interpreter with no problem: http://www.espruino.com/Order http://www.espruino.com/Order