[EpicEng]

Yiur first paragraph is simply absurd, so I'll ignore it.

So what is one to do once they have designed a system using this platform? Do you want to turn it into a product? Great! Go redesign the entire thing from the ground up because what you made is a toy.

It can't be manufactured at a reasonable cost. The code will have to be completely rewritten. The hardware has to be completely re-specced. What a waste of time.

There are plenty of micro platforms our there these days that require relatively little knowledge of hardware,yet at least resemble something you may actually see in the real world. Use those.

That said, I could see myself being proven wrong here,which is fine. It would only take some enthusiastic person who already knows JavaScript and has some revolutionary idea to-do do so.

My opinion is that you don't need to sit on mountains of abstraction at all times. No abstraction I'd perfect and we already have enough people in this industry who don't really understand what the hell they're doing. Learning something new isn't a bad thing.

[noodle]

Dude. You need to get some perspective on this.

People are not going to buy a Tessel to build a production-grade hardware project. It is for hobbyists.

[EpicEng]

Fine; it's the paint by numbers of the hardware world. Oh, and it's really expensive to boot. Raspberry Pi's and Arduinos are for hobbyists; this is a child's toy.

[noodle]

Seriously, who cares? Why is there a badge of pride on our industry being hard? Its not like using a Tessel is something grandmas can do. Why is it a requirement for someone to know how to wire up a LED without blowing it? Software has become huge specifically because you don't need to know Assembly or even C to build real things that people can use.

If anything, you would think that you'd be overjoyed. People would hypothetically try to create products with these "child's toys" and give people like you a more robust job market and salary prospects. Or they wouldn't and it doesn't affect you at all.

[pessimizer]

You seem to be repeatedly straw-manning EpicEng without replying to what he/she is actually saying. Maybe I'm just seeing that because I agree, but writing a useful embedded application in javascript seems about 100x harder than any of the standard ways, teaches you nothing useful, and would have to be rewritten from the ground up to go into production. It's a legitimate concern, not an "I'm so much smarter than you" brag.

[noodle]

I don't think you read me correctly.

I agree with the facts and premise he presents. A Tessel is a toy. It is not going to teach you C, Assembly, or any of the realities of hardware development.

I disagree with the premise that this is a bad thing. I disagree with the premise that people are buying Tessels with the intent to create production grade products. This is literally a toy for people who want to screw around with hardware. This is not a bad thing.

Would you give people shit for buying some Lego Mindstorms to do the same thing instead of a Tessel?

[DrewAllyn]

> Do you want to turn it into a product?

Probably, they don't want to turn it into a product. Probably, they just want to use it themselves. In this case it makes total sense to improve speed of development despite increasing unit cost.