Well, I've never thought of BASIC as brilliant
Actually I used BASIC to compare it's simplicity on the eyes, not it's capabilities.
Of course not. And when someone does finally port Oberon to the ESP8266, it will be done in C.
Hmmm. Why would one need to use C to make an Oberon target compiler for ESP8266? 'Porting' is probably the wrong term.
btw - Astrobe isn't free
True, but who in their right mind wants to work for free? There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Beside, it is very inexpensive if you have priced the professional MCU dev kits out there. Besides, Astrobe was created as a competitor to the professional dev kits (like Atmel). If Astrobe were to become popular in the hobbyist realm, this just might change.
I am VERY happy with the return on my $145 for the "personal" edition and plan to upgrade to pro soon as I can. The only drawback is that there are no targets in the 'mini MCU' crowd yet.
Oh, I said that the graphics demo (from the video) was 22.2kb. I was wrong. That is the graphics.mod (graphics lib) size. The application is actually 17kb. Look in the description on YouTube.