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Comment by ajarmst | Hacker News Reader

My colleagues have developed a "spitting noise" ritual after any utterance of the word "Arduino" (<hock> ptui). As embedded developers attempting to teach others, they're not enamored of Arduino's burgeoning, and dominant, market of "people who want to do embedded development but not learn anything about embedded development" sucking up all the oxygen. I know, that's an oversimplification, but not as much of one as I could wish.

I don't want to wish anyone ill, but the emergence and success of competitors that don't go so far out of the way to hide the complexity (and the need for good practice) of working with embedded systems and SBCs, wouldn't be such a bad addition to the ecosystem.

(As one of two developers who actually fool around with Arduinos and Pis a fair bit (although I detest the Arduino dev environment and 'sketches'), I'm tired of all the vandalism and graffiti in my cubicle, TBH).

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Lets view what your saying through another lens:

My colleagues have developed a "spitting noise" ritual after any utterance of the word "PC" (<hock> ptui). As MAINFRAME developers attempting to teach others, they're not enamored of PC's burgeoning, and dominant, market of "people who want to do COMPUTER development but not learn anything about MAINFRAME development" sucking up all the oxygen. I know, that's an oversimplification, but not as much of one as I could wish.

I don't want to wish anyone ill, but the emergence and success of competitors that don't go so far out of the way to hide the complexity (and the need for good practice) of working with COMPUTERS systems and MAINFRAMES, wouldn't be such a bad addition to the ecosystem.

(As one of two developers who actually fool around with PC's and APPLES a fair bit (although I detest the APPLE dev environment and 'PRODOS'), I'm tired of all the vandalism and graffiti in my cubicle, TBH).

Am I suggesting that this is going to be how things turn out? No probably not. It baffles me that many people who code, have little to no understand of their mainframe roots and commit sins that were solved ages ago. However some of this reaction is to the simplification and replacement of technology with things that are more affordable and more in reach even if they aren't the same.

+1 for ProDOS

There's another plane on which the analogy fails: the first generation of PC enthusiasts were working with a genuinely new thing. The consumer/hobbyist-grade hardware that the introduction of the 4004/8008/6502 made possible was quite literally impossible only a few years prior. And there was good competition (OK, we Apple ][ folks despised the 'Trash-80', and everyone looked askance when the Commodore 64 with its glitzy marketing toward people who didn't even own soldering irons showed up, but we peripherally recognized each other as factions of the same tribe, and there were options).

Neither of those things is true of the Arduino. I learned how to design simple control systems on Microsequence Controllers ancestral to the AVR more than thirty years ago. And the techniques I learned there still apply to the more sophisticated chips available now. Even the hobbyist platform stuff isn't new. I was wire-wrapping DIP 650*'s into perf-board in the early 1990's, and I built an HC11 model rocket launch controller for my kid the better part of two decades ago. And I know more than a dozen people, not all of them professional engineers, many with only two-year college diplomas who were doing sophisticated hobbyist projects well before the turn of the millennium.

The Arduino isn't analogous to the Apple ][. We had to learn how to program in BASIC and needed to know what a memory map was. It's analogous to Windows 95: a well-engineered product that completely dominates the market, establishes that you don't really need to know anything, and stifles innovation.

> stifles innovation

I'm really curious about this - what innovation does Arduino stifle?

From my position with some school level dabbling in embedded, it seems like the industry is quite healthy and that there is a lot of innovation happening in terms of hardware outside Arduino, especially on the commercial side of things, where the perception is that Arduino has next to no market share.

I disagree. Arduino was new because of the scale of its distribution. I built robots with Basic STAMPs in the early 2000's so I know there were prototyping platforms before, but they never took off in the way that arduino did.

And the openness of Arduino was critical to starting my own company, when I built an Arduino compatible board with a fast processor and wireless radio.

One could argue computers weren't new - we had vacuum tubes for ages. But it was putting it all together in a certain way (and the associated maturity of certain tech) that led to a step change in what those things meant.

For me, arduino similarly created an explosion of hobbyists working with circuits for the first time, and I'm happy that people who know very little have something to work on. But I am sad that the openness has been falling by the wayside.

I'm sorry, but I fail to see how a product that makes it not just easier, but possible in the first place for people to work with embedded controllers, is "stifling innovation."

I've been all over the map on this issue. I've hand-assembled 6502 code, written assembly language for PIC chips, and C code using Microchip IDE. I've hand-wired my own development boards, that I etched myself.

Today I use the Arduino IDE and one of the Teensy boards. I doubt I'd be happy with that setup for large projects, but it's perfect for what I'm doing right now, using the microcontroller practically as a glorified GPIO for a PC. You can use "pure" GCC to program the Teensy, but I'm not sure that I need to care at this point.

For the general population, I just like the idea that the Arduino and RPi ecosystems have practically revived the electronics hobby, and expanded the number of people who are interested in getting into programming. It's still a hobby, but it's a great hobby, and I admire hobbyists.

I understand your point, but there is a good middle ground for people. As a software developer, I was amazed the first time I connected a LED to the RPi's GPIOs and made it blink with software. From that, I moved to an Arduino, with its Lego style shields, and to an ESP8266 and my own PCBs.

I don't think the Arduino is just for people who don't want to learn anything about embedded. Those people exist, but it's good that they can do stuff with hardware without learning. The people who do want to learn, will learn faster with the Arduino ecosystem than without it.

That said, the Dev environment sucks, PlatformIO all the way.

That's a fair point, (and +1 for PlatformIO). And that is sort of the argument I sometimes find myself making: the Arduino Hardware is delightful. It's the ecosystem that has emerged around hobbyists that is problematic. It may just be early teething pains of something that will become remarkable. But right now, we find ourselves spending a lot of time walking back bad habits and lack of understanding of fundamentals when students show up with "projects" that involve a "schematic" that is really just a photograph of a breadboard, and the introduction of complex parts without ever consulting a data sheet, based on random code just pulled down over the Internet. And I've seen commercial products that are at about the same level of quality. The problem may be that Arduino is too forgiving.

I've made the argument that the Arduino is great for quick and dirty projects (a colleague builds stuff for Escape Rooms that only ever exist for a few months using them), and for trying out ideas when you already know what you're doing. They're less valuable as a tool for learning that stuff, if only because of the Wild West nature of the ecosystem.

Learning by experimentation is a perfectly valid way of learning. You can't force people to learn in depth but, if you want to, there's no problem gradually deepening your understanding over time by trying stuff and thinking about it.

The problem may be that Arduino is too forgiving.

Isn't that the same argument for using xml over html?

It's the same argument for putting Republicans instead of Democrats on the bench. Whether or not you find that argument compelling doesn't really affect whether you find another one similarly structured to be similarly so.

s/Arduino/Node.js/g

It's exactly the same problem. These platforms make it really easy (too easy?) for people who don't really know what they are doing, to quickly build up something that is functional, but without then understand the underlying concepts. Grab this library, copy and paste from this tutorial, change a few lines and boom! You have a blog or IoT weather station.

And that is bad because?

It's bad when people that don't really understand what they're doing release products, but I didn't know that was the case with Arduino. I've used it for learning/prototyping without ever having any intention of creating the final product with it (or at all really).

That's bad when have tons of connected buggy, unsecured devices powering botnets. Not that I blame hobbyist for that, but such mindset that "hardware is easy" should not prevail.

The thing is, if you wait till you know things to start learning, you will not learn at all. This is quite visible in programming - people who assume "it is complicated" or try to learn all basics before doing things have low changed of becoming programmers. Whether they came to that conclusion alone or someone gave them that advice, "don't do stuff until you know what you are doing" is bad advice for students.

It also filter out precisely the people who tend to listen to advice.

Meanwhile, people who confidently do crap despite not knowing anything, make mistakes in the process, but can eventually learn to become good.

Mistakes are fine, and expected as someone is learning, but when you put something out there that has severe security problems, that's... a problem.

I don't have a good solution to that. Certainly a lot of the frameworks out there have security bolted on as an afterthought, or, at best, just don't make it easy to build things that are secure by default.

But ultimately it comes down to the author of the code to take responsibility for the security of the code they throw out there and promote as something people should use. And that's the crux of it: I want people to experiment and learn, but there needs to be a way to keep those sorts of people from building (or perhaps just distributing or promoting) things that (unintentionally) harm others, at least until they're knowledgeable enough to avoid doing that.

It is surprisingly hard to find good advice on how to code securely beyond absolute basic advice. And a lot of it even bundled in things that are good engineering/process (use linter, code review), but lead to security only indirectly. Code review wont make code more secure if reviewer does not know what to look for when doing said review.

The way it works is that general advice I have seen many times is "don't do it". Finding how to code securely or comprehensive list of insecure patterns is much harder. So, people inclined not to follow advice and the ones with huge ego are the ones attempting to create security related software.

I am not saying that I have instant solution, but strategy of discouraging people from trying does not work well. Promoting good beginer level write ups would work better.

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Nevertheless, the original topic was arduino and doing circuits while being unable to read schematic. That is seen as a problem, because they did not learned theory before doing 5V dummy circuits.

And I think it is as good start for learning or getting interest as any.

"Finding how to code securely or comprehensive list of insecure patterns is much harder."

The problem is not only secure coding, actually, I'd argue that it's not even the biggest concern. You can produce the most secure code on the whole world, but that won't matter if your device has an unprotected or easily brute forced telnet access by default. Loose default security settings and permissive access is the key concern imho.

If you want to learn how to secure software then learn how to hack. It will give you an insight into the tools and techniques used to breach systems and especially give you an insight on how many attack vectors there are.

Kali Linux and the tutorials for that are the Arduino of hacking.

I'd suggest that upwards of 95% of arduino projects are not accessible via any kind of network connection.

Also that around 95% of arduino projects are useful in educating & encouraging people around small microprocessor / electronics projects.

Lol...there are ALOT more buggy , unsecured devices on the internet that are made by companies with "professional" programmers. Look at the crappy DVR's and Webcams coming out of China, not to mention the buggy and perpetually exploitable software that companies like Microsoft and Adobe produce ( and sell for profit) I agree that inexpensive and easy to use developer boards make it easier for a hobbyist to screw up, but the things that are doing the most damage on the net are not hobbyist items.

That hasn't been my experience. In fact, I spent months finding an appropriate MOSFET to drive some LEDs because the random ones I spent a month waiting for couldn't switch fast enough. That taught me right quick to read datasheets to make sure I get what I need.

These days, however, I recommend the ESP8266, not so much the Arduino. You lose the shields' flexibility, which may put people off with the steeper learning curve, but you gain a lot in capability.

> As embedded developers attempting to teach others, they're not enamored of Arduino's burgeoning, and dominant, market of "people who want to do embedded development but not learn anything about embedded development" sucking up all the oxygen.

I don't think oxygen is the finite resource your colleagues think it is in this metaphor. Why in the world would they not want something that lowers the barrier to getting more people involved with things like embedded development? Some of those people may even go on to start learning more about embedded development. It's so much better than keeping the barrier to entry high, thus discouraging people to get into it and learning more about how the world around them works. Would we rather people continue to have no context about what we do and treating electronics like a black box?

And who cares if they don't actually want to learn more than they need to about embedded development? Just as your colleagues spent their lives becoming experts and doing embedded development for a living (I'm presuming), others chose rather to spend their careers elsewhere. Everyone has different priorities and tradeoffs to consider vying for their time. Any time we can allow people to accomplish more with less, possibilities open up with the time we do have.

"Embedded developers" are really not Arduino's target audience. It's always been a platform for expanding the market of electronics hobbyists some of whom go on to learn more of the underlying chip features if they do something more serious.

On the other hand if you are in the business of selling embedded development education to newbies, then you need to realize that Arduino is outcompeting you - like iPhone destroyed the old Windows smartphones.

The old Symbian* smartphones.

Just a detail, I know, but as far as I remember, I changed few Symbian devices before the iPhone came out and I hopped over Android soon after.

I can't really recall there being any Windows phones back then. This is just how popular Symbian was in that period of time. If there were any Windows devices (forgive my ignorance), they were definitely not nearly as popular to make a mention of iPhone killing them instead of e.g Symbian ones.

Just my 2¢, but the crux of your argument doesn't change, so you got a +1 from me for it. :)

What about "Pocket PC"? I remember the Compaq IPaq having a high profile back then (2001).

Edit: maybe a more valid example is the O2 XDA "Windows Mobile" phone/PDA (2003)

> sucking up all the oxygen

Could you say a bit about what you mean by this? It's not at all clear to me why it matters to those who do "real" embedded development that there are hobbyists out there using a simplified platform (and, yes, perhaps developing some bad habits).

This is not to say I disagree, necessarily, that a competing platform that better introduces users to the complexities of embedded systems would be a bad thing. Though I'll also add that, as someone whose day-to-day work is very from from embedded development (I'm a lawyer), the Arduino platform has been great for leading me slowly into this world. I'm still a newb, but I've learned far more about embedded systems (and electrical engineering) than I think I ever would have otherwise. Personally, I think Arduino is a great way to learn both the basics and the complexities--you can accomplish something in a "rough and ready" way very very quickly, and then incrementally delve into the complexities as your interests (and needs of your project) demand.

As a software developer who has been doing hardware for a while I have to say I'm both unimpressed with the toolchains for embedded and the kind of software developers produce. Honestly: it is like you shed 30 IQ points and went 25 years back in time.

Of course embedded sucks and is hard: people think this brittle, shitty mess is a sign of cleverness and that this is how it should be.

Don't shit on Arduino for being old tech and attracting the plebs. It contributes to increasing the size of the audience which might in turn mean the embedded world becomes more professionalized when it comes to software. Because it sure as fuck is no fun to rewrite stuff all the time because the embedded industry tends to hire shit software people.

If something looks stupid but does the work, it's not stupid.

Ha, I bet that is annoying to deal with. The things are fun, but they are basically toys.

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