i seriously doubt BDmicro was even seen by Arduino its Yet Another Dev Board. and avrfreaks is (if you read the article) the anti-hero. you missed the most important one which is Processing.
by winning, 'this guy' means that it has become a standard development platform and test bed EVEN FOR people who do not in general use AVRs. not having a standard test bed for devices is such a massive annoying failure in electronics, its difficult to explain how much not having it sucks. its like you know how every programming language has stdin/stdout with print(f)? ok, then Arduino is the printf.
having a standard test bed for devices is such a massive annoying failure in electronics
This is a very well phrased description of a problem I've seen for a long time. I'm not an Arduino user: I prefer to use "raw" AVR devices in my own circuits. But something like the Arduino, like the BASIC Stamp before it, provides a sort of "language" to explain how to do things that was missing before.
In the days of PC's with printer ports, someone asking how to blink an LED under computer control could be given a simple answer that would have them up and running quickly. Now we need to find out if it has a printer port, or maybe a serial port to use one of the control lines, or otherwise suggest purchasing a USB device to use instead...
But with something like the Arduino available, the answer can be as simple as "buy this device (Arduino) from this vendor and run this code and your LED will blink." From the very beginning, the people involved are using a common vocabulary: the same development platform. And that has benefits that cannot be ignored.
The Arduino's standard for i/o headers, its development library for avr libc and avr-gcc, and its usb->serial interface for pushing hex files ("sketches") into the chip are where it shines.
It's not a "printf" but rather an S100 bus if you will.
I think the enthusiasm for Arduino (and previously the Basic Stamp) is the excitement that newbies have when they can get something happening on a small embedded system via a simple, spoon fed development environment. I personally have never wanted to program Microchip parts in anything other than assembler or Atmel parts in anything other than C. I find Arduino's dev tools to be an annoyance getting between me and the hardware, so it's the first thing I ignore- but that's just me.
by winning, 'this guy' means that it has become a standard development platform and test bed EVEN FOR people who do not in general use AVRs. not having a standard test bed for devices is such a massive annoying failure in electronics, its difficult to explain how much not having it sucks. its like you know how every programming language has stdin/stdout with print(f)? ok, then Arduino is the printf.