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by iostream23 1665 days ago
Your metaphor that “python is the new basic” stems from desktop computers use of BASIC to teach beginning programming skills on largely 8 bit machines.

Once you started with BASIC you presumably moved to learning assembly language, as many of these machines gained c compilers, you might have tried to obtain one.

The entire point of micropython is a friendly introduction or friendly prototype platform or learning platform. In no way does micro python take advantage of the hardware nor could it ever directly talk to hardware.

One should not treat all programming languages the same as they have different purposes and python is not fit for the purposes a c or c++ is fit for, aka memory allocation etc. The number one lesson a beginning embedded programmer should take away from arduino is that controlling hardware is about writing specific bit patterns to memory locations. Sorry, this is not something python can do or was designed for.

Deeply embedded means “embedded Linux won’t suffice”

Your car braking system had better not be a micropython program.

There are actual safety proofing systems in which code is proven, and the python interpreter itself will not come close to passing as the complexity is too large. (Formal verification is the Search term you seek (

2 comments

Yeah when somebody says something like 'deeply embedded' the platform that comes to my mind is the Dreamcast VMU, which has a cpu that doesn't (AFAICT) yet even have a C compiler. ("C compiler....the idea was abandoned."--https://dmitry.gr/?r=05.Projects&proj=25.%20VMU%20Hacking) I doubt something written in Rust would be adequate for such a CPU.
> Once you started with BASIC you presumably moved to learning assembly language, as many of these machines gained c compilers, you might have tried to obtain one.

I would have guessed quite a lot of people went from BASIC to Turbo Pascal. But you're talking 8-bit machines; maybe that was only available for 16-bit and up?