Peter Hoddie on JavaScript for embedded systems
The O’Reilly Hardware Podcast: Hardware abstraction, scripting languages, and user experience.
Rock wall. (source: Brian Hawkins on Flickr)
This will be a breakout year for JavaScript on embedded systems. Our guest on the Hardware Podcast this week is Peter Hoddie, who founded Kinoma, which makes software and hardware for building JavaScript-powered prototypes. Previously he was one of the original developers of QuickTime at Apple.
Computing power has become so inexpensive, and the JS developer community so large, that the accessibility and fast development times of JavaScript will outweigh the efficiency advantages of C and assembly for all but fairly specialized projects.
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Discussion points:
- Scratch, which begat Blockly, which begat KinomaJS Blocks, which can be used to program the Create embedded platform.
- Transitioning from software development to hardware development.
- The importance of developing hardware that is flexible, modular and abstracted. “Why should you throw out your hardware because the software is obsolete?” Hoddie asks.
- Tools: Hoddie swears by profilers, including Apple’s Instruments and the Kinoma Studio profiler
- Writing your own JavaScript engine—in this case, Kinoma’s XS6
This week’s click spirals:
- Peter Hoddie: The work of the transcendentalist writers of the 1840s and their visions for American society.
- David Cranor: The Rock-afire Explosion, the animatronic band featured at Showbiz Pizza in the 1980s, and the current market for robot wonderment.
- Jon Bruner: A glance at the Internet’s past with the 2006 book The Internet: The Missing Manual by David Pogue and J.D. Biersdorfer. Some things are familiar; others, not so much.