[buescher]

You're not entirely wrong, and thanks for pointing this out, but polling is also frequently used to mean "busy-wait loops" - you can look for it if you doubt me. I didn't really want to get into that conversation.

The other thing that polling implies is that there will not always be data present when you poll (think of a UART driver), and you might block as long as there is, and you may or may not be polling at a deterministic rate. Sampling unambiguously implies that a sample is always present and handled. It does not preclude any use of interrupts - you can sample with a timer interrupt or handle a sample with an A/D interrupt.

Many embedded programmers of a certain age have a nearly fixed mental model of a microcontroller as a sort of headless VIC-20 and a certain horror at sampling techniques that derives from enduring crummy polling peripheral drivers/handlers from the early days of personal computing.