> For most 8-bit CPUs the tools are either proprietary or of lower quality than for the 32-bit CPUs. Arduino IDE is definitely not low quality. >It is true th

> For most 8-bit CPUs the tools are either proprietary or of lower quality than for the 32-bit CPUs. Arduino IDE is definitely not low quality. >It is true that I have never used an Arduino, because every time when I looked at any model it appeared overpriced and without any advantage whatsoever over a Cortex-M board, so I could not understand why would someone waste time with it. - Because you don't need 32 bits to turn on a LED and read an ADC. - Because in 2008-2014 there were not many cheap Cortex M boards, and hobbyist ARM tooling was low quality or expensive (Keil, IAR, etc) and didn't come out of the box with pre-made sample projects that could get you up and running on stuff like UART, ADC, SPI, etc. - Because Arduino coade was easily portable meaning sharing projects that drove particular displays or other external peripherals or widgets would just be copy-paste plug and play instead of having to tailor the C code you got from someone else to your particular ARM microcontroller, and configure the peripherals, clocks and keep fucking with it to get it to work like ti worked for the other person, etc. Project portability and cross compatibility was the big selling point of the Arduino ecosystem. You didn't need to know any programming or C to get some humidity or ultrasonic senor from Adafruit to work on an Arduino, because most likely someone already published the code or library for it.