I plan to use one of them in the custom soldering station I'm building.
of course, it's a classic Catch-22 situation. I need better soldering irons to assemble the soldering station. I bought a 150W adjustable up converter (Up to 30 V output) to use one of the new irons to build it. :)
Arduino uses a sort of bastardized C++, but you can usually ignore the differences. Eclipse is an open-source IDE that has plugins for C, C++, Java, and most of the languages-du-jour, as well as a bunch of other things. The debugger is gdb, which isn't very good, but nearly everyone uses it because it's free, ubiquitous, and pretty well supported.
There's a non-GDB open-source debugger project called ZeroBugs, which I quite like, but it was written by one guy who now has a day job and can't support it very well. It's streets ahead of the usual linux debuggers, but not as good as the Visual Studio one, let alone the IBM VisualAge one (which was the gold standard, RIP).
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