One of the great advantages of the Acorn hardware was that there was no barrier to entry if you wanted to program them. Perhaps because their initial focus was computers for use in education everything you needed was always right there. You could sit down and start typing code.

If you wanted to write C (there was a C++ compiler based on CFront too IIRC) then you had to buy a compiler, but people achieved a huge amount with the tools available on stock machines.

For a number of years, Acorn had the most powerful desktop computers in the world at a reasonable price, but they failed to capitalise on that advantage & were eventually overtaken by the MS/IBM/Intel juggernaut.