imagitronics.org

The spin language used by the Parallax Propeller chip is pretty brutal. There are quite a few little nuances that go against everything you’ve ever learned in your intro to programming courses. I felt kind of like a hacker in the mid 80’s when I got overly excited to see a simple “Hello World” type application on the screen.

It’s really not the language or the chip that’s difficult, per say, but rather the ybox2 specific libraries that implement the TCP/IP stack. A lot of the code is left up to your application, so even the simplest of the network-enabled widgets work out to around 300 lines of code. That’s a lot to digest when you’re just learning a new architecture and language.

Not to mention I’ve been pretty spoiled by Visual Studio and Eclipse for the past 4-5 years. I’m so used to having all the documentation described to me as I type, that having to find the source files and check what methods/constants/variables are available is a real drag!