Well, way back then, the Arduino IDE was precisely the game changer that made a lot of hobbyists and average people get into embedded systems without much friction or EE background, and not the board based on an Atmega MCU that anyone else could make.
Many eons ago before the Arduino came out, I used to have EE labs in university based on the same Atmega chip but using a commercial IDE-compiler, and boy was that a giant PITA as a young buck, having to read dozens of datasheet pages, calculate by hand all the register values just to get a bloody 1 ms PWM timer output on a pin, which never worked the first time and needed an oscilloscope to debug.
"Oh, you did everything right, but forgot to flip the bit of the correct pin of the output port in the right registry, have fun debugging it for the next 3 hours while you pull your hair out."
And we used "modern" C, not AVR assembly (which is still nice and quite simple to understand once you get the hang of it, don't get me wrong). Sure, as an EE, that was a mandatory right of passage to prep you for a job in the industry, but not something average people would want to do as a hobby.
The fact that you can do that with 2 simple lines of code, from an API, from a well documented library, that's well tested and guaranteed to work, without an expensive commercial toolchain and HW debugger, was the game changer for the hobbyist market.
But this move feels a bit late in the game for them. They should have done this nearly 10 years ago, but now it feels like they squandered their early lead and became sort of irelevant amongst the sea of RPi, ESP32, STM32 with their own easy to use toolchains and libraries.
Many eons ago before the Arduino came out, I used to have EE labs in university based on the same Atmega chip but using a commercial IDE-compiler, and boy was that a giant PITA as a young buck, having to read dozens of datasheet pages, calculate by hand all the register values just to get a bloody 1 ms PWM timer output on a pin, which never worked the first time and needed an oscilloscope to debug.
"Oh, you did everything right, but forgot to flip the bit of the correct pin of the output port in the right registry, have fun debugging it for the next 3 hours while you pull your hair out."
And we used "modern" C, not AVR assembly (which is still nice and quite simple to understand once you get the hang of it, don't get me wrong). Sure, as an EE, that was a mandatory right of passage to prep you for a job in the industry, but not something average people would want to do as a hobby.
The fact that you can do that with 2 simple lines of code, from an API, from a well documented library, that's well tested and guaranteed to work, without an expensive commercial toolchain and HW debugger, was the game changer for the hobbyist market.
But this move feels a bit late in the game for them. They should have done this nearly 10 years ago, but now it feels like they squandered their early lead and became sort of irelevant amongst the sea of RPi, ESP32, STM32 with their own easy to use toolchains and libraries.