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Comment by ptorrone | Hacker News Reader

this is going to go in my collection of classic comments about arduino, you're saying arduino is "bad" and "harmful" (to who and how?) because more, and different people than you might get interested in electronics as a hobby. wow.

here's another you may enjoy from my article "Why the Arduino Won and Why It’s Here to Stay"

“Arduino: baby-talk programming for pothead” – ArnoldB, AVRfreaks.net http://makezine.com/2011/02/10/why-the-arduino-won-and-why-i...

disclosure, i work at the open-source hardware company, adafruit and we make arduinos for arduino.cc !

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Besides, last time I checked "open-source hardware" meant VHDL, Verilog and FPGA. The word has been hijacked I guess.

Arduino, as a piece of hardware btw is a nice development kit on its own.

> to who?

Everyone and especially the arduinists themselves.

> people than you might get interested in electronics as a hobby. wow.

People get interested in Arduino, not electronics; they get interested in the bling, not how it works. Instead of wasting time with Arduino, they can as well just read the datasheets.

Then I guess everyone who has not written their own network stack and built their own networking hardware should get off the internet. After all, they are just interested in the bling and not how it works.

No, wrong analogy. Web browsing should not be advertised as an introduction into TCP/IP.

If you really want to get into TCP/IP it's not the worst place to start, and all the others who just browse for fun aren't hurting you any, are they?

Arduino has its niche: it is artists; it actually started as a part of Processing. However, what bothers me is the culture around it: newspeak ("fritzing" etc.), lack of understanding that it is a toy and inferior thing, not suitable for real-world applications; abundance of bad hardware designs; overall drive toward abstraction, which is not ok when dealing with real world tasks.

Web browsing is more likely to get someone interested in TCP/IP than plopping the RFCs in front of them. I know I've found myself more motivated to learn more of the basics of electronics after working with an Arduino than basic crap I put together for a logic course.

People learn different ways and are motivated in different ways. I'm motivated to learn top down in electronics. Arduino is helpful to that crowd.

The problem starts when someone unfamiliar with low level OS details writes a network service; you end up hacked. With arduino people get false sense of knowledge and when they put the things togethe for a real world application, it ends up bad.

> I'm motivated to learn top down in electronics.

Very dangerous and potentially deadly approach (electric shock, battery caught fire, floating inputs cooked the processor etc.) Electronics is not programming: errors have tanible consequences.

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