When I see a device like this I like to think that people familiar with JS can now tinker with hardware devices. I know some people who are comfortable with JS but aren't engineers and they may not be willing to learn Arduino C.
Whatever language it is I'm glad prototyping devices are coming out at a cost that basically makes them an impulse purchase.
So, I don't really buy arguments like this. Would your friends who are comfortable with JS but aren't engineers actually be interested in learning microcontroller programming because they can do it in JS? When you move from scripting a web page to programming on a very limited embedded system, you're changing to a completely different paradigm. Instead of worrying about the DOM and AJAX, you're worrying about GPIO and PWM and interrupts. The actual syntax of the language is a rather minor detail compared to all of this. Now, I'm not saying that we should all be coding microcontrollers in ASM or AVR C, but what makes Javascript more approachable than, say, Arduino?
Because it takes a lot more time to learn another language proficiently than it does to adapt what you already know to a different platform. It's accessible.
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When I see a device like this I like to think that people familiar with JS can now tinker with hardware devices. I know some people who are comfortable with JS but aren't engineers and they may not be willing to learn Arduino C.
Whatever language it is I'm glad prototyping devices are coming out at a cost that basically makes them an impulse purchase.
So, I don't really buy arguments like this. Would your friends who are comfortable with JS but aren't engineers actually be interested in learning microcontroller programming because they can do it in JS? When you move from scripting a web page to programming on a very limited embedded system, you're changing to a completely different paradigm. Instead of worrying about the DOM and AJAX, you're worrying about GPIO and PWM and interrupts. The actual syntax of the language is a rather minor detail compared to all of this. Now, I'm not saying that we should all be coding microcontrollers in ASM or AVR C, but what makes Javascript more approachable than, say, Arduino?
Because it takes a lot more time to learn another language proficiently than it does to adapt what you already know to a different platform. It's accessible.