[giantrobot]

> There's a temptation to demand that others do things the hard way just because we had to. But is it healthy? I don't lament the demise of the 555 any more than I lament that the youth no longer knows how to put shoes on a horse.

I agree with both you and the GP. Arduinos tend to make goofing around with electronics more accessible to more people. At the same time a lot of projects could be built very simply with just a couple timer chips. It's unfortunate people reach for a relatively complex solution (Arduino etc) to what's ultimately a simple problem. They would benefit a great deal from just knowing a blinking light can be made very simply with a simple circuit.

[ryandrake]

I liken it to people who reach for kubernets and docker and microservices and cloud infrastructure when a simple LAMP stack running on a single box will do. And people who reach for a hosted javascript app when a native one that doesn’t require internet will do. They’re not wrong, just unnecessarily complicating things because they learned how to do it the complicated way.

[giantrobot]

I get what you're saying and I don't disagree but I don't know if the analogy works.

An Arduino is very approachable in that you can just plug it into a USB port and tell it to blink a light following a very simple tutorial. No breadboards even, just plug in a device and open a program. Under the hood the Arduino is very complex but for the end user it's very simple.

A lot of Arduino compatible modules are also simple for the end user despite being very complex under the hood.

The simplicity for the end user is I think the biggest attraction for the Arduino. In your K8s analogy, it is not simple for the end user. Someone may build some K8s monstrosity because that's what a tutorial or bootcamp taught but it's very obviously complex. The hosted JavaScript app is a better Arduino analogy, it's a complex solution under the hood but presents a relatively simple user experience.