"Here, now you can buy hardware that enables you to hire bootcamp-level devs to do your professional industrial work. That way you can pay non-professional wages for professional-level work!"
Stop normalizing putting bloated, heavy languages on embedded platforms.
Arudino however is great as an experimentation platform, where having access to things like a Python or JS REPL can make experimentation a pleasure, being able to rapidly update and prototype is much easier when you don't have to reflash and reboot every time.
I recently bought a door access control pad, plugged it into an ESP32 and messed with it using MicroPython to better understand how it'd produce outputs. The datasheet it came with was lacking to say the least, but this was a big savior.
Last time I checked, PICBasic was a thing, and spawned a generation of programmers.
Comodore 64 Basic, and TI-83 Basic were also simplified programming environments. (TI-83 implemented jumps as a O(n) lookup throughout your code... jumping to later functions was more costly than jumping to earlier functions...).
Its the simple programming environments that spawn new generations of programmers. Today, "Basic" is no longer the starting point, today's beginner programmers use Javascript or Python.
But there always were "beginner" languages, no matter how slow computers were in the past.
Some of the biggest successes are because beginner-friendly kits were delivered to universities. Linux and Unix are a great example of this: students taught in Linux / Unix environments (even using "toy" languages like Python) end up growing into professionals who... still use Linux.
One of the most important business moves for a "platform" is to figure out how to get beginner-level students comfortable with your platform. Linux somewhat did this accidentally, but today we need to purposefully create that environment.
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Besides, even on the same project... not everyone needs to be an expert embedded engineer. By allowing Javascript onto the platform, you can hire a Web GUI-developer who probably knows a lot more about UI-design than you.
The Web GUI master can work their Javascript into your application, and run code side-by-side with your tightly optimized C code. No, it won't be efficient. But that's what a 480MHz processor is for, to help you run less efficient code at speeds that are acceptable.
This isn't even hypothetical: with WiFi 802.11 n support, this Arduino could very well be running Web-applications served from some centralized location (distributed wirelessly over standard LAMP / HTTP stacks). It will be up to the C System programmers to ensure that a locked-up GUI thread won't wreak the system (or break realtime promises)... but there would be major benefits to distributing applications over standard internet mechanisms.
Sorry but, if you have to ask this question, it's pretty clear that you have no idea what many industrial settings require.
There are ruggedness requirements, stability requirements, longevity requirements...
I work in an industry where our products are used for LITERAL decades. There's no way that anything even remotely marketed as "beginner friendly" could begin to work for anything we do.
You can't just throw more hardware at a problem and use that as an excuse for shitty software, come on. This incredibly flawed logic is why the minimum requirements for a chat program include 32GB of RAM.
Beginner friendly doesn't mean that the other requirements disappear.
The Arduino can run Javascript. Sure, you don't have to make it use Javascript, but it can be done. Just because Arduino runs Javascript doesn't change its -40C to +85C operating temperature.
Arduino can be BOTH beginner friendly, AND rugged enough to operate at sub-zero temperatures indefinitely. And if you really want to "remove Javascript" from your stack, then you're 100% welcome to do that.
Universities on the other hand, have other requirements. Beginner friendly is absolutely a necessity for students. You have to hook students with something easy if you want the students to be interested in projects. Having a SINGLE platform scale from beginner usage, all the way up to professional usage, is extremely important for the general ecosystem.
And I still argue that opening up Javascript developers onto the platform is a good thing. UI design is complicated, and someone who fully focuses on the user-experience, culture, and presentation is useful. (Even if a GUI designer is ignorant of embedded issues, they can remain helpful in other ways).
Beginner friendly includes price. If you have the other requirements, it's going to cost much more. Doesn't matter if it's beginner friendly if a development board costs $5k.
The actual device here looks quite rugged, comes with a variety of useful specs. The Arduino Pro IS the beginner friendly development board, the beginner-friendly introduction to STM32.
A "real" product would strip off all the unnecessary parts and only use the $17 STM32H7 chip alone.
For example, it is impossible to control how V8 converts its internal integers to floats and how. One Math.* method may output a Number which is a float behind the scene, another one int, and another one int double.
GC on MCU is completely unpredictable too. If it fires when you need to poll latency sensitive peripheral, things hang.
But I suspect there are enough niches it fills it will be successful.
Their codebase would improve immensely if they used a more powerful chip to run Linux and Python instead.
If newer hardware makes it cheaper and easier to make cool shit while maintaining the price point and power budgets of previous generations, who gives a shit?
This new stuff makes tinkering with hardware way more accessible than before and that is a good thing for everybody.
Arduino is excellent for what it was originally designed for - an easy, accessible platform for artists and non-engineers to experiment and prototype. Arduino are now reaching well beyond that market and targeting more serious applications, so we are entirely right to question whether a) Arduino's design trade-offs are acceptable in mass-market products and b) whether we really want to lower barriers to entry in this area.
Personally, I think the answers are a) no and b) absolutely not. If you need the hand-holding that Arduino offers, you have absolutely no right to ask a user to plug your widget into their network. Engineers are in a position of trust and we have a moral obligation to treat that position with absolute seriousness.
If you're going to use something that's basically a late-90s desktop and develop on the basis that you can afford to burn cycles, you might as well use a proper RTOS and enjoy all the affordances that come with it.