To add to this, abstracting away from hardware is exactly what C (which most people consider low-level) was built for. No one wants to write assembly, and even less people want to write 0s and 1s or punchcards.
Successfully-executed abstraction is a wonderful thing, people have been trying to abstract away (but retain performance) of C for decades. I welcome newcomers, maybe someone will get it right
Agreed, the state of art of most microcontroller manufacturers these days is to push out a (usually buggy) Eclipse based IDE with undocumented C libraries. They all have their quirks and issues - noone has got it right yet from the developer's point of view. This seems like a step in the right direction, albeit taking a big performance hit.
I completely agree. I'm a front end developer recently out of college and I decided recently that I wanted to expand my knowledge and learn hardware. This seems like a good place to start given my knowledge of JavaScript
If your college education for becoming a developer didn't teach you a lower level language it failed you. Even at my small liberal arts school we use multiple languages (they may all be really, really similar, but they're different languages), and work on low-level things.
I'm aghast that a CS education wouldn't include at least Java, especially considering that a large number of schools switched exclusively to Java at one point.
I learned C++, Java, Scala, Python and Ruby. I just prefer and am most familiar with Scala & JavaScript these days because I use Play. While I could go back and refresh my knowledge of C, it's nice having a device that uses the language I already use on a daily base given I have little to no experience in actually working with hardware.
As to your point to zhemao about learning new things, I said in my original post that I wanted to learn new things, in this case, hardware.
A general attitude that I've seen as a new user on HN (and a new developer): "If you don't learn something you enjoy (messing with computers) in exactly the same way that I did, you're wrong!"
For some, there's no joy in complexity or inspiration in learning. Just wrong or right--generally with "my way" being right. What a shame!
Seems like a lot of that energy would be better spent making an equivalent device that runs <language of preference>. Want it to run coffeescript? go make a product designed around coffeescript. Want it to run Lua? Go make a product designed around Lua. etc.
The market has room for diversity. Just because it's not the diversity you prefer, doesn't make it any less valid.
But why a dedicated device? Why not just a JS -> ARM/AVR/whatever compiler? Then you can run it on microcontrollers that you can actually build up from. One of the best things about arduino is that it's based upon the ATMega platform. Once you've got the hang of the arduino language, you can progress to embedded C (on the same device), then onto assembly if you really want.
Once you've got to that level you've got a whole family of related microcontrollers that you can move onto from the same principles. With this javascript device you've got no such thing. You're stuck in a dead end if/when it turns out not to have what you need, as you can't progress to "the next level".
Any sort of compiler for JavaScript could only support a subset of the language, unless you shipped an interpreter alongside the compiled code. This subset might be unfamiliar enough to the point that moving to a new language wouldn't be that much harder for some programmers.
I also see nothing on the site to suggest that C/C++ (at least) couldn't be supported, although I have no clue how much work you would have to do yourself (likely too much).
