The modern low-cost microcontroller ecosystem is just mindblowing. Arduino Nano and all the ESP32 devices are so cheap, so easy to program, have such a huge community, and so many low-cost peripherals. It's super fun, addictive, easy, and practical. :)
Or even cheap FPGAs and DSPs.
I love it, I wish it was so accessible 15-20y ago.
@BartWronski somewhat related: while not “cheap”, you can build your own actual silicon too via Tiny Tapeout etc. My friend is doing a Z80 right now, and it is mind boggling that “your own actual chip” is a thing you can just do. https://github.com/rejunity/z80-open-silicon
@BartWronski It was there, but it was a 68000 repackaged as a "DragonBall" microcontroller. I don't think they marketed it well enough - the ESP32 ate their lunch (eventually)
@TomF I never programmed anything with 68000. But I remember my college DSP class where the college bought some TI prototype boards. For 2 months, we, the TAs and the professor wasted time trying to program them because of some JTAG programmer and software incompatibilities and flakiness.
@TomF In another class, we programmed Z80-based boards; at least those worked. We got things done, and it was super fun, but without libraries, it was a non-obvious effort for many of us to configure stuff like GPIO or external I2C controllers, and then we treated this part as "do not touch" code.