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I’m a sufficiently advanced programmer, and I still use the Arduino IDE rather than anything else for my electronics projects (though mostly non-Arduino boards

I’m a sufficiently advanced programmer, and I still use the Arduino IDE rather than anything else for my electronics projects (though mostly non-Arduino boards these days) My VSCode setup is already crowded with Development tools for other platforms and the Arduino IDE reliably works, with the libraries. I’ve been using the 2.0 beta for awhile And it is really nice. I’m pleased it’s made it out of beta.

andyfilms1 4y ago
Lots of people swear by PlatformIO on VSCode, and that's totally fine. But if you're the kind of programmer that just wants "notepad, but with an 'upload' button" the Arduino IDE is hard to beat.
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Why would anyone want that though? Masochistic challenge? "If you're the kind of person who likes to wash their clothes by hand..."
  - jrockway 4y ago
    I like Arduino IDE as kind of a living reminder of "how the other half lives". I'm sitting here with Tinygo and my J-Link pushing several revisions of my code per minute (not to mention fucking goroutines and channels on an ARM M0 core), and other people are fiddling for hours trying to get Arduino IDE to compile code for 45 minutes only to be told COM69 is no longer connected (because Windows decided that it's now COM123). I really think that professional software engineers are trolling "normal people" with stuff like this. Oh, you want to be a programmer? Jump through these 8 million flaming hoops suspended over man-eating sharks, and you'll see just how hard it is to make an LED blink. After failing, you will dedicate a new national holiday to our sacrifices; we do this for a living and you should be grateful that literal human garbage like you are even allowed to THINK about monitoring the water level of your potted plants. But behind the scenes, we don't do this for a living. When we press TAB, our IDE knows exactly which level to indent the text too. When we want to reflash our microcontroller, it does a diff of the last binary we pushed and updates only the 3 flash cells that actually changed and updates it in microseconds. When we want the documentation for some library function, it pops up in a web browser hovering above our cursor. Our life is nothing like this. We just use our skills to give you tools to make you think programming sucks. It's all a scam.
    - AlecSchueler 4y ago
      So yes a masochistic challenge then?
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      I definitely agree. Arduino was good back in 2009 when professional alternatives were expensive and complicated, but it basically didn't change at all until now. And they've only really fixed the IDE. The rest of it is still terrible. Awful API, badly written libraries, everything done over an (emulated!) serial port. It's like the legal system where emails are converted to fax when sent and then back to email when received. That said, I think Mbed should have eaten Arduino's lunch but they kept making loads of different terrible build systems, and there are still a load of old boards available that need firmware updates to work properly. I have a couple of K22F's that have been bricked just by plugging them into a Windows machine. Never happened with Arduino. So yeah, Arduino have sat still at the "it's rubbish but it works pretty reliably" stage while Mbed has failed to get beyond "it's great... when it works".
  - capableweb 4y ago
    VSCode is kind of bloated + really bad if you like to exclusively use keyboard control rather than "mouse sometimes", as things lose focus easily when notifications and other things gets focus and then it doesn't drop focus back where you were. Not every tool is for everyone, and that's fine :)
  - mid-kid 4y ago
    Because having thirty billion integrations and automations, toggles and etc that a new user may mess up is overwhelming for a newcomer. Arduino IDE serves great as a plug-and-play introduction to microcontrollers, allowing people to learn what they're doing before figuring out what the billions of automation tools are and how to tame them. It's the same reason python still has IDLE, it's just notepad with a run button, because it's all you need when you first start getting to grips with everything.
    - IshKebab 4y ago
      I don't think syntax highlighting and autocomplete and live error squiggles and tooltip help make things harder for beginners. The optimum beginner experience definitely isn't Eclipse, but it also definitely isn't Notepad!
sgtnoodle 4y ago
Yeah, I'm the same way. I battle build systems, cross compilers and version control all day for work. I have specific company owned laptops set up for all that. When I just want to mess around with a microcontroller, I fire up the Arduino IDE, and use Google drive for versioning...
taf2 4y ago
Interesting I found platform.io and a like a Makefile approach so I can continue using vim… but it’s a little frustrating when the esp32 s3 came out and support lagged behind… maybe I should use the more native approach for these or maybe just use the IDE… I just can’t bring myself to learn a user interface that will not be the same in 10 years… vim and bash have not really changed in 20 years …
DannyBee 4y ago
I'm the exact opposite. I find the Arduino ide totally unusable. It takes forever to start up. Every operation is slow. It can take over ten seconds to open a small file and display it on an top of the line 12th gen Intel laptop It literally recompiles all code on every verify or upload (because "we don't want lots of machine objects littering hard disks") So on any of the mbed based boards compiles are like a minute or two for anything. On platformio and other compatible ways, it is instant. So even for basic messing around I don't use the Arduino ide because it makes it not fun
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  > It can take over ten seconds to open a small file and display it on an top of the line 12th gen Intel laptop What did you do to your computer? My 5 year old Ryzen desktop opens the Arduino IDE in ~1.5 seconds.
  - dachryn 4y ago
    I had something similar, I thought Arduino IDE was crazy slow, but then switched laptops and it was crazy fast. Not that the new laptop was more expensive or a lot newer, just different. I blame windows stuff I guess, it's definitely not just CPU power
    - DannyBee 4y ago
      I can make this happen on macos too :)
    - Teknoman117 4y ago
      I mean, I'm on Linux, but I really wouldn't expect the JDK performance to be that different between operating systems.
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    I can screencast it, but it's actually consistent even across OSes. My top of the line macbook, with a fresh arduino 2.0 ide install on MacOS, is the same way. Meanwhile, literally everything else works great.
deleted 4y ago
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wejick 4y ago
This is the problem with vscode that I'm sure many are experiencing. I hope they add easier way to manage and run multiple profiles of the IDE.
- ComSubVie 4y ago
  I do have set up different workspaces for different development tasks where only the necessary plugins are activated. If I do embedded development I open my platformio.workspace, if I'm doing Java I have a workspace and if I'm doing JS/Frontend stuff I have a workspace as well as for LaTeX. It really works well and isn't really difficult (although I'm not really sure that workspaces should be used for this)

andyfilms1 4y ago

Lots of people swear by PlatformIO on VSCode, and that's totally fine. But if you're the kind of programmer that just wants "notepad, but with an 'upload' button" the Arduino IDE is hard to beat.

IshKebab 4y ago
Why would anyone want that though? Masochistic challenge? "If you're the kind of person who likes to wash their clothes by hand..."
- jrockway 4y ago
  I like Arduino IDE as kind of a living reminder of "how the other half lives". I'm sitting here with Tinygo and my J-Link pushing several revisions of my code per minute (not to mention fucking goroutines and channels on an ARM M0 core), and other people are fiddling for hours trying to get Arduino IDE to compile code for 45 minutes only to be told COM69 is no longer connected (because Windows decided that it's now COM123). I really think that professional software engineers are trolling "normal people" with stuff like this. Oh, you want to be a programmer? Jump through these 8 million flaming hoops suspended over man-eating sharks, and you'll see just how hard it is to make an LED blink. After failing, you will dedicate a new national holiday to our sacrifices; we do this for a living and you should be grateful that literal human garbage like you are even allowed to THINK about monitoring the water level of your potted plants. But behind the scenes, we don't do this for a living. When we press TAB, our IDE knows exactly which level to indent the text too. When we want to reflash our microcontroller, it does a diff of the last binary we pushed and updates only the 3 flash cells that actually changed and updates it in microseconds. When we want the documentation for some library function, it pops up in a web browser hovering above our cursor. Our life is nothing like this. We just use our skills to give you tools to make you think programming sucks. It's all a scam.
  - AlecSchueler 4y ago
    So yes a masochistic challenge then?
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    I definitely agree. Arduino was good back in 2009 when professional alternatives were expensive and complicated, but it basically didn't change at all until now. And they've only really fixed the IDE. The rest of it is still terrible. Awful API, badly written libraries, everything done over an (emulated!) serial port. It's like the legal system where emails are converted to fax when sent and then back to email when received. That said, I think Mbed should have eaten Arduino's lunch but they kept making loads of different terrible build systems, and there are still a load of old boards available that need firmware updates to work properly. I have a couple of K22F's that have been bricked just by plugging them into a Windows machine. Never happened with Arduino. So yeah, Arduino have sat still at the "it's rubbish but it works pretty reliably" stage while Mbed has failed to get beyond "it's great... when it works".
- capableweb 4y ago
  VSCode is kind of bloated + really bad if you like to exclusively use keyboard control rather than "mouse sometimes", as things lose focus easily when notifications and other things gets focus and then it doesn't drop focus back where you were. Not every tool is for everyone, and that's fine :)
- mid-kid 4y ago
  Because having thirty billion integrations and automations, toggles and etc that a new user may mess up is overwhelming for a newcomer. Arduino IDE serves great as a plug-and-play introduction to microcontrollers, allowing people to learn what they're doing before figuring out what the billions of automation tools are and how to tame them. It's the same reason python still has IDLE, it's just notepad with a run button, because it's all you need when you first start getting to grips with everything.
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    I don't think syntax highlighting and autocomplete and live error squiggles and tooltip help make things harder for beginners. The optimum beginner experience definitely isn't Eclipse, but it also definitely isn't Notepad!

sgtnoodle 4y ago

Yeah, I'm the same way. I battle build systems, cross compilers and version control all day for work. I have specific company owned laptops set up for all that. When I just want to mess around with a microcontroller, I fire up the Arduino IDE, and use Google drive for versioning...

taf2 4y ago

Interesting I found platform.io and a like a Makefile approach so I can continue using vim… but it’s a little frustrating when the esp32 s3 came out and support lagged behind… maybe I should use the more native approach for these or maybe just use the IDE… I just can’t bring myself to learn a user interface that will not be the same in 10 years… vim and bash have not really changed in 20 years …

DannyBee 4y ago

I'm the exact opposite. I find the Arduino ide totally unusable. It takes forever to start up. Every operation is slow. It can take over ten seconds to open a small file and display it on an top of the line 12th gen Intel laptop It literally recompiles all code on every verify or upload (because "we don't want lots of machine objects littering hard disks") So on any of the mbed based boards compiles are like a minute or two for anything. On platformio and other compatible ways, it is instant. So even for basic messing around I don't use the Arduino ide because it makes it not fun

Teknoman117 4y ago
> It can take over ten seconds to open a small file and display it on an top of the line 12th gen Intel laptop What did you do to your computer? My 5 year old Ryzen desktop opens the Arduino IDE in ~1.5 seconds.
- dachryn 4y ago
  I had something similar, I thought Arduino IDE was crazy slow, but then switched laptops and it was crazy fast. Not that the new laptop was more expensive or a lot newer, just different. I blame windows stuff I guess, it's definitely not just CPU power
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    I can make this happen on macos too :)
  - Teknoman117 4y ago
    I mean, I'm on Linux, but I really wouldn't expect the JDK performance to be that different between operating systems.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  I can screencast it, but it's actually consistent even across OSes. My top of the line macbook, with a fresh arduino 2.0 ide install on MacOS, is the same way. Meanwhile, literally everything else works great.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wejick 4y ago

This is the problem with vscode that I'm sure many are experiencing. I hope they add easier way to manage and run multiple profiles of the IDE.

ComSubVie 4y ago
I do have set up different workspaces for different development tasks where only the necessary plugins are activated. If I do embedded development I open my platformio.workspace, if I'm doing Java I have a workspace and if I'm doing JS/Frontend stuff I have a workspace as well as for LaTeX. It really works well and isn't really difficult (although I'm not really sure that workspaces should be used for this)