Tessel: The end of web development as we know it
The theme at this year's JavaOne was (once again) The "Internet of Things" (IOT) and the community keynote address was by Freescale's CEO who proclaimed that the price of an Internet connected (or connectable) uC would need to be about $0.30 (US).  At that price point, I can see a world where everything is Internet enabled.  Of course, the devices we were discussing were all running Java.Tessel looks like another implementation that attempts to bring the same technology to another demographic.  Their fancy new system (the developer doesn't touch the Lua parts), should have a broad appeal and running NodeJS provides a lot of room to extend the system in the directions needed.I see a couple problems with IOT and another that's more specific to Tessel ... if these problems have been addressed, perhaps I haven't noticed!  Tessel is based on Javascript, but there is no standard for interacting with hardware (performing I/O) in Javascript ... I think the eco-system would be healthier with a whole slew of companies like Tessel, but is anyone working on this standard?  The IOT problems are more social (since we have uC that connect to the Internet today).  1)  Are we ever going to take the security of devices that cost pennies seriously enough?  You might not care if your water heater is rigorously protected when Internet connected, but a few thousand of them that are programmed to turn on at the same time is an issue for the power company.  2)  Do I want everything around me to be that "aware".  Privacy can be lost in little dribbles and we've seen our increasing power to correlate this data into your identity.