> why do you say setup and loop are the worst imaginable way to write embedded software?
Because there's neither abstraction nor ways to combine things. Say you have a device that needs to do two things, and you look up some examples of how to do each thing. Each example is going to have its own loop() function--but how do you combine them? There's no notion of tasks or threads. There's no abstraction for device drivers. Arduino is a system that paints you straight into a corner.
[edit to add] Any reasonable software environment needs to provide three things, quoting "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" here [1]:
* primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with,
* means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and
* means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units.
Arduino only provides the first.
[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...
Because there's neither abstraction nor ways to combine things. Say you have a device that needs to do two things, and you look up some examples of how to do each thing. Each example is going to have its own loop() function--but how do you combine them? There's no notion of tasks or threads. There's no abstraction for device drivers. Arduino is a system that paints you straight into a corner.
[edit to add] Any reasonable software environment needs to provide three things, quoting "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" here [1]:
* primitive expressions, which represent the simplest entities the language is concerned with,
* means of combination, by which compound elements are built from simpler ones, and
* means of abstraction, by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units.
Arduino only provides the first.
[1]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/...