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My personal experience was the opposite. I own two identically equipped boards: the Seeed Studio ArchMix and the Teensy 4.1 On the archmix, I managed to boot u

My personal experience was the opposite. I own two identically equipped boards: the Seeed Studio ArchMix and the Teensy 4.1 On the archmix, I managed to boot up and that’s about it. There was literally a REPL and I was able to blink the LED and then I couldn’t proceed further, where was I supposed to code? Bad experience. Teensy: connect the board , fire up the teensyduino ide, choose an interesting example from the drop down menu, run it, rinse and repeat until you are familiar with idioms for all sorts of things, real hardware examples they do real things, real peripheral support in the form of examples

a2800276 4y ago
I agree that the user experience, onboarding etc. are very well executed for Arduino (and especially for the ESP32 port of uPython could use some polishing)... > rinse and repeat until you are familiar with idioms for all sorts of things Except that the idioms you learn are really not suitable for anything but toy examples. Arduino is rotten from the core: "setup", "loop" and "delay" are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software, yet everyone coming from Arduino thinks this is how well written embedded software should look.
- noedig2 4y ago
  > "setup", "loop" and "delay" are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software I agree with "delay", but why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software?
  - jdcarter 4y ago
    > why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software? Because there's neither abstraction nor ways to combine things. Say you have a device that needs to do two things, and you look up some examples of how to do each thing. Each example is going to have its own loop() function--but how do you combine them? There's no notion of tasks or threads. There's no abstraction for device drivers. Arduino is a system that paints you straight into a corner. [edit to add] Any reasonable software environment needs to provide three things, quoting "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" here [1]: * primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with, * means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and * means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units. Arduino only provides the first. [1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-10.html#%_sec_1.1 https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
    - turbinerneiter 4y ago
      You don't have to use `setup` and `loop` tough. We use Arduino as a library in C++ using PlatformIO as tooling. Best of both worlds. The thing you are hating on is pretty much this file: https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr/blob/master/cores/arduino/main.cpp https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr/blob/master/cores... Arduino is C++ with some boilerplate and a library.
      - a2800276 4y ago
        But these `setup`, `loop` and `delay`, as well as the terrible "IDE" are central to the "simple" user experience of Arduino and are, imo, false friends. Teaching people busy loops and blocking behavior from day 1 is counterproductive because you'll have to unteach them later and jump through hoops to avoid them. Arduino libs are strongly optimized for "easy", not efficiency and flexibility.
        turbinerneiter 4y ago
        I did just fine and so are millions of other people. Using Arduino will not magically rot your brain and make you unable to ever learn other things. It will however get you started quickly and therefore give you an in. I started using Arduino in a student job, then used Micropython, did my masters thesis on using Micropython on cubesats and now I run a team of 15 hardware engineers. All of this happened because I got started with easy beginner tools. There was no one to teach me the "real" way. The people preaching the real way and railing against simple beginner stuff usually don't write tutorials, build easy to use devboards or write easy to use libraries.
- analog31 4y ago
  Indeed, those obstacles are easy to overcome, but someone has to point a beginner in the right direction. As I understand it, the ability to program Arduino in C was originally kind of an accidental feature of Arduino. The original Arduino downplayed C, and referred to the programming language as "wire." A few people (myself included) discovered that by simply ignoring those constructs, Arduino becomes a full fledged C development environment. But I think doing things "the right way" on a microcontroller really requires learning concepts that are not beginner friendly, like interrupts, and for that matter, electronics.
- dTal 4y ago
  Why are "setup()" and "loop()" bad? setup() is just main().
turbinerneiter 4y ago
You need to buy a Pyboard from MicroPython, or Adafruit Express board for CircuitPython. Then you get a bunch of onboarding tutorials. CircuitPython is very nice for beginners, Adafruits tutorials are gold. Switching to MicroPython is very easy (CircuitPython makes some simplifications to be more beginner friendly, MicroPython aims to be as "professional" as possible).

a2800276 4y ago

I agree that the user experience, onboarding etc. are very well executed for Arduino (and especially for the ESP32 port of uPython could use some polishing)... > rinse and repeat until you are familiar with idioms for all sorts of things Except that the idioms you learn are really not suitable for anything but toy examples. Arduino is rotten from the core: "setup", "loop" and "delay" are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software, yet everyone coming from Arduino thinks this is how well written embedded software should look.

noedig2 4y ago
> "setup", "loop" and "delay" are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software I agree with "delay", but why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software?
- jdcarter 4y ago
  > why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software? Because there's neither abstraction nor ways to combine things. Say you have a device that needs to do two things, and you look up some examples of how to do each thing. Each example is going to have its own loop() function--but how do you combine them? There's no notion of tasks or threads. There's no abstraction for device drivers. Arduino is a system that paints you straight into a corner. [edit to add] Any reasonable software environment needs to provide three things, quoting "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" here [1]: * primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with, * means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and * means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units. Arduino only provides the first. [1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-10.html#%_sec_1.1 https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
  - turbinerneiter 4y ago
    You don't have to use `setup` and `loop` tough. We use Arduino as a library in C++ using PlatformIO as tooling. Best of both worlds. The thing you are hating on is pretty much this file: https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr/blob/master/cores/arduino/main.cpp https://github.com/arduino/ArduinoCore-avr/blob/master/cores... Arduino is C++ with some boilerplate and a library.
    - a2800276 4y ago
      But these `setup`, `loop` and `delay`, as well as the terrible "IDE" are central to the "simple" user experience of Arduino and are, imo, false friends. Teaching people busy loops and blocking behavior from day 1 is counterproductive because you'll have to unteach them later and jump through hoops to avoid them. Arduino libs are strongly optimized for "easy", not efficiency and flexibility.
      - turbinerneiter 4y ago
        I did just fine and so are millions of other people. Using Arduino will not magically rot your brain and make you unable to ever learn other things. It will however get you started quickly and therefore give you an in. I started using Arduino in a student job, then used Micropython, did my masters thesis on using Micropython on cubesats and now I run a team of 15 hardware engineers. All of this happened because I got started with easy beginner tools. There was no one to teach me the "real" way. The people preaching the real way and railing against simple beginner stuff usually don't write tutorials, build easy to use devboards or write easy to use libraries.
analog31 4y ago
Indeed, those obstacles are easy to overcome, but someone has to point a beginner in the right direction. As I understand it, the ability to program Arduino in C was originally kind of an accidental feature of Arduino. The original Arduino downplayed C, and referred to the programming language as "wire." A few people (myself included) discovered that by simply ignoring those constructs, Arduino becomes a full fledged C development environment. But I think doing things "the right way" on a microcontroller really requires learning concepts that are not beginner friendly, like interrupts, and for that matter, electronics.
dTal 4y ago
Why are "setup()" and "loop()" bad? setup() is just main().

turbinerneiter 4y ago

You need to buy a Pyboard from MicroPython, or Adafruit Express board for CircuitPython. Then you get a bunch of onboarding tutorials. CircuitPython is very nice for beginners, Adafruits tutorials are gold. Switching to MicroPython is very easy (CircuitPython makes some simplifications to be more beginner friendly, MicroPython aims to be as "professional" as possible).