I Don’t ‘Do’ Arduino

And I don't care! A few years ago I got an Arduino starter kit at a garage sale. I have kids now and not much geek time. I finally plugged the thing in, and literally 5 minutes later I was running code on it. Who cares that it's inefficient. It makes the difference between a project built and one not built. I already posted my most recent one the other day, but why not again...

https://github.com/MarkusWandel/battery-tester

The code is right there. It's simple, it's readable, anyone could understand it in half an hour and change it. Not as heroic as my biggest MCS-51 assembly language project, whose source code is here:

http://wandel.ca/homepage/rom.asm.html

But tell me which of these is going to get someone over the "I can do this!" threshold?

I'd say this blog post is the real hindrance.

It's ridiculous to suggest that people should always start at the very lowest level; that newcomers to a space are somehow "hindered" by not doing everything the hardest way possible from the get-go. It's like saying Basic was a hindrance to game programming because the people who cut their teeth on it were shielded from the concerns that "real game developers" have to deal with in C and C++. Quite the opposite! Anything that opens things up and helps more people discover an interest is good for that field in the long run, even if they have to learn more as they progress (who doesn't?).

This just reads as a big, tasteless, "look how much smarter and more experienced I am than you"

He is correct about the code size, and certainly about the abstraction hiding details, but those things don't matter for 99% of the cases. Many 'makers' are using something Arduino based to do a few simple tasks that in years past could have been done with a $1 PIC but required significantly more skill to build.

Even more so, with the advent of the ESP32 you have an incredible, fast, cheap platform with wifi that you can use to solve real world problems that those old PICs could never do - and Arduino makes that in reach for more people.

Sure, those of us that are more serious tend to do things more efficiently and directly. We also dig more into those hardware details and the underlying architecture, but the reason those boards are $5 is because of everyone else that buys them to use with the Arduino environment.

Note: I have used the Arduino environment for many years, as well as almost all of the direct platform tools. One could write a book about the compromises in the Arduino platform.. a book that few would read. For anything serious I tend towards to OEM tools and compilers, and like the author I have my own collection of libraries that I have developed, some that are pretty cool, and some that a really terrible. Sounds pretty standard for software development.

Many Arduino users don't care about these points, they'll never need to know the difference between the 16kb part and the 64kb; they'll never care about the higher performance available with tighter code either. When some of them do hit a situation where it becomes relevant, articles like this will help them figure out where they need to go.

I recently got into hardware during the past year. The learning curve (especially on the software side of hardware) is quite steep. Also the toolchains suck. Coming from a webdev world it is night and day as to the amount of open source code out there that helps you get started. Arduino helps chip away at that steep learning curve and I wish there were more projects like it.

While he fears Arduino, he does not see the bigger picture. He should be celebrating the demise of C that is coming for his livelihood.

> It’s never too early to start thinking about the long term prospects of the product you’re building.

- it's practically the opposite of what on higher level of software development is called YAGNI - "you ain't gonna need it". In other words, it's actually detrimental to "optimize too early", in more than one way.

At the same time it would be nice to have an alternative way to develop software for microcontrollers, without Arduino's unwanted features, like those described.

I mention fast feedback, because it's so important to new entrants to a field. I tried to build some MCU project way back in the early 2000s, which involved soldering together a parallel port based programmer, and attempting to drive a blinking light as the first project.

It didn't work. I have no idea why. Maybe I had blew some components up or put one in backwards. I don't know what I did wrong, and I didn't know enough to debug it. I didn't know enough to know what questions to ask.

When I came back to MCU programming many years later, I picked up an Arduino kit. A small part of me felt like it was cheating, but it let me get started. It let me iteratively play around with and learn concepts piece by piece. Ironically, I feel like now I'd actually now have a chance of debugging and fixing that parallel port programmer.

So, the battery needlessly dies in a day.