alt Hacker NewsI'm sorry you've had a bad experience but I don't agree, I prefer it to the ST, TI and definitely the Microchip tooling. It's CLI first, like the Espressif and Pico tooling which is a big plus for some and not for others.
Also, no mandatory login walls for toolchains and datasheets gets them a lot of goodwill in my book.
I'm proficient with many MCU families.
Microchip tooling: download, double click, install, just works. Zero need for any framework, good bare metal support. a C project is an actual C project. Granted, if you use that MCC piece of shit you're in for a bad time, but going bare metal require zero effort, a single include file if you need to access peripherals, and you actually have documentation to do so.
ST tooling: sort of almost just works, more effort but you can still go bare metal with relative ease.
Current nordic: it's actually a zephir project, thousands of files to generate and compile. No options to go bare metal. (used to be possible with the older SDK, or so they tell me. Too bad i can't seem to be able to let a project compile with the old SDK, or set up the IDE for intellisense with the new SDK, but i haven't had enough time yet.)
Bonus: Espressif. At least their VSCode integration really just works. The peripherals are frustrating and severely bugged though and there can be supply chain issues, and that's the reason i'm looking at nordic for some BLE-enabled project, because the ESP32 parts won't cut it for this or that reason (usually the basic yet still bugged peripherals).
But i'm willing to put up with microchip's BLE modules again (i evaluated them several times over the years, always a disaster. But not the newer based on PIC32MZ, and the price have come down to be reasonable.) if the only option with nordic is the zephir monstruosity.