The issues he’s highlighting really come down to product design. [Benjie] points out that programming robots is super hard, but it’s also hard in more than one way and for more than one reason.

Lego robots The Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System (RIS) is a kit for building and programming Lego robots. It has 718 Lego bricks including two motors, two touch sensors, one light sensor ...

A dedicated and talented user community has produced dozens of alternate programming environments for these robots, everything from Forth to C to SmallTalk.