The authors comments are interesting, but perhaps underplay the fantastic effect that Arduino has had on the microcontroller and maker world. He is correct abo

The authors comments are interesting, but perhaps underplay the fantastic effect that Arduino has had on the microcontroller and maker world. He is correct about the code size, and certainly about the abstraction hiding details, but those things don't matter for 99% of the cases. Many 'makers' are using something Arduino based to do a few simple tasks that in years past could have been done with a $1 PIC but required significantly more skill to build. Even more so, with the advent of the ESP32 you have an incredible, fast, cheap platform with wifi that you can use to solve real world problems that those old PICs could never do - and Arduino makes that in reach for more people. Sure, those of us that are more serious tend to do things more efficiently and directly. We also dig more into those hardware details and the underlying architecture, but the reason those boards are $5 is because of everyone else that buys them to use with the Arduino environment. Note: I have used the Arduino environment for many years, as well as almost all of the direct platform tools. One could write a book about the compromises in the Arduino platform.. a book that few would read. For anything serious I tend towards to OEM tools and compilers, and like the author I have my own collection of libraries that I have developed, some that are pretty cool, and some that a really terrible. Sounds pretty standard for software development.