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Comment by krastanov | Hacker News Reader

I am using arduino to teach newbies no older than 16yo. PlatformIO/VSCode/CLI are a terrible idea in that case.

Absolutely this. I'm nowhere near 16 anymore but if my first encounter with Arduino involved setting up PlatformIO or even CLI tools I would've moved on very quickly to something else. The whole point of Arduino is to be as beginner (and lazy people) friendly as possible.

I’ve been mentoring an FRC team (highschool age) where vscode has been the development environment for 3 years now. In my experience it hasn’t been one of our pain points.

A tabbed text editor is approachable enough for anyone that uses the web, and then we don’t use many features beyond the file tree view and a few items in the Ctrl-shift-p menu. It helps that the students interested in programming are usually comfortable using windows to start with but we also take students that don’t know how to use anything but a mobile OS and teach them.

Maybe, some kids like diving into the meat of things. Might be good to show them one way, but also let them know that the other exists. I've found PIO much easier to use after just a few days of playing with.

Sure, that is easy to do after you have them hooked up. But dead-simple installation is the only thing I care about when each extra click turns off another 20% of the newbies (made-up percentage). Especially if you want to present it as "a tool that you can use improve your main hobbies/interests", as opposed to something they should master. Pushing even further on this, when I show a PhD bio-engineer how to use Arduino to automate their bio-reactor, I am certainly going to use the two-click-to-setup Arduino IDE, instead of PlatformIO. The extra features are detrimental when all you want is to show a tool exists and can make your life easier and more interesting with minimum extra effort.

Is this a good summary:

PlatformIO for generation of value.

ArduinoIDE for demonstration of value.

Oh, sort of like why learn to ride a bike when you can just get a car or a moped?

Exactly the opposite. Learn the simple tool (the bike / the single click Arduino IDE) before expecting kids to know how an engine works. This is the most basic obvious principle in pedagogy.

Sure, but many kids won't have the patience to play with PIO. The Arduino experience to make a LED blink is literally connect the device, copy paste the blinker code into the big text box, select the device and port in the tools menu, click upload, done. That can be done in a few minutes without any of the kids getting too bored.

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