No, not really. My point wasn't about a checkbox item on a feature chart.

The point is the language has evolved for quite a long time in a direction very different from talking to hardware. Basic capabilities like the ability to work with bytes are a foundation that a lot of other constructs are built on top of, and adding it in late in the game doesn't undo all that came before it, or provide all that should be built on top of it.

It's not that you can't do this kind of work with JavaScript (obviously you can). It's just that it seems like very bad fit (even if you ignore its history with browsers), when there were a lot of other choices that seem like they'd have made things easier for programmers getting started in this area.

Is it really any worse than BASIC? And the BASIC Stamp was the choice of hardware for hobbyists for years before the Arduino took over.

Remember, the goal here is to try to make things better. ;-)

And your plan for making things better: Java.

shudder

Well, there are JVMs and native compilers for the embedded market, able to target less powerful boards, hence cheaper design per unit, with much more performance out of the box.

Yeah, I pointed some of those out to him... but I don't think that's what he's getting at.

That's not my plan. I just wouldn't have been surprised by the choice.