Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Embedded C as programming languages

General Discussion
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"You keep using Arduino, Raspberry Pi and Embedded C as programming languages.
This doesn’t make sense. But every year I get 10 extra points by pointing it out. Fair enough."

We had this feedback from a respondent of our latest Developer Nation Survey. I reached out to our Analyst team to ask them to respond and here’s what they said.

Raspberry Pi isn’t listed anywhere in the survey as a programming language - we only include Raspberry Pi OS as an option in the question about the embedded operating systems respondents target.

On Arduino: the main way to write code for Arduino boards is, well, with the Arduino programming language, which is variant of C++. Strictly speaking, Arduino is an API based on C++, but people commonly consider it a programming language.

Similarly, Embedded C is an extension of C used for embedded programming. Some people say that there’s no difference between the two, but others argue that there are some small but important differences that justify the distinction.

What are your thoughts on this topic @ayan.pahwa?

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Thanks for the tag @Vanessa here are my thoughts:

Arduino maybe better used as Arduino/Wiring/C++, as Arduino is the hardware and abstract library framework but programming language they use is Wiring based of c++ .

Also I don’t see survey using RaspberryPi as programming language but there was a question which asked about OS used in embedded projects and RaspberryPi OS is a valid option for that one. I understand it’s not perfect suitable for commercial products since it’s bloated and more suitable for desktop / home server usage but still I see some indie hacker products using RaspberryPi OS as base OS to ship products which is okay as long as it works and FWIW it’s based on Debian.

Having worked in Embedded / IoT I feel embedded C is a valid option. When we say Embedded C yes it’s C but I immediately think of more bit operations, register level access and strict memory allocations.

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