> interacting with the hardware is easy, speaking to a web API becomes a huge pain.
Particle (particle.io) does a pretty nice job of bridging this gap in my experience. You still write code in C-like Wiring, but they have built-in APIs for storing data in the cloud and calling webhooks. It's not as simple as interacting with web apis from JS, and the fact that it relies on their cloud service would make me hesitate to use it in a commercial product. But for my home play projects, it provides a really nice balance of using C for the hardware stuff without making the networking stuff a major pain.
Particle (particle.io) does a pretty nice job of bridging this gap in my experience. You still write code in C-like Wiring, but they have built-in APIs for storing data in the cloud and calling webhooks. It's not as simple as interacting with web apis from JS, and the fact that it relies on their cloud service would make me hesitate to use it in a commercial product. But for my home play projects, it provides a really nice balance of using C for the hardware stuff without making the networking stuff a major pain.