I'm pretty familiar with the microprocessor architecture of the 8-bit era that I grew up in, and have done a fair amount of hardware hacking. As things have gotten more complex, I've let some things slide, such as the complexity of pipelined architectures.
Arduino is not even syntactic sugar any more. All it retains of its origins, that I'm aware of, is the weird setup() and loop() schtick. And you have limited control over what happens before your code starts. But with most Arduino compatible boards, you have full access to the vendor supplied libraries, and can go as deep as you want. These days my preferred platform at work is Teensy 4, and at home, the wireless enabled boards. I think Paul Stoffgren is some kind of 100x engineer.
But life is short. Over my 61 years, I've carefully rationed the brain cells that I devote to innards of technologies that will soon be obsolete. I read the Turbo Pascal manuals cover to cover, and The Art Of Electronics, but I never cracked Inside Macintosh. I've decided that I will simply not learn anything about any OS that is not Linux, and superficially at that.
I program desktop computers in high level languages, despite total abstraction of the innards.
I think the relative portability of Arduino code has been a huge boon for hobbyists because it encourages the formation of a community of people who can share code and knowledge, even if they're not all using the same processors, and despite sometimes needing to tweak code when porting it from one platform to another. This was also the case with early FORTRAN. Portability across processors revolutionized scientific computing.
I'm pretty familiar with the microprocessor architecture of the 8-bit era that I grew up in, and have done a fair amount of hardware hacking. As things have gotten more complex, I've let some things slide, such as the complexity of pipelined architectures.
Arduino is not even syntactic sugar any more. All it retains of its origins, that I'm aware of, is the weird setup() and loop() schtick. And you have limited control over what happens before your code starts. But with most Arduino compatible boards, you have full access to the vendor supplied libraries, and can go as deep as you want. These days my preferred platform at work is Teensy 4, and at home, the wireless enabled boards. I think Paul Stoffgren is some kind of 100x engineer.
But life is short. Over my 61 years, I've carefully rationed the brain cells that I devote to innards of technologies that will soon be obsolete. I read the Turbo Pascal manuals cover to cover, and The Art Of Electronics, but I never cracked Inside Macintosh. I've decided that I will simply not learn anything about any OS that is not Linux, and superficially at that.
I program desktop computers in high level languages, despite total abstraction of the innards.
I think the relative portability of Arduino code has been a huge boon for hobbyists because it encourages the formation of a community of people who can share code and knowledge, even if they're not all using the same processors, and despite sometimes needing to tweak code when porting it from one platform to another. This was also the case with early FORTRAN. Portability across processors revolutionized scientific computing.