Depends on what you consider "serious". You can watch a Kickstarter video, at least the beginning. A gadget which shows you weather. Is it serious? I dunno. But

Depends on what you consider "serious". You can watch a Kickstarter video, at least the beginning. A gadget which shows you weather. Is it serious? I dunno. But I find it useful. Well, perhaps I don't need to know weather in Tokyo if I'm too far away from it. Just knowing meteo report for my area, and actual temperature outside would be good. But wait, if I have an upcoming trip to Tokyo, I'm actually interested in weather in Tokyo during next couple of weeks. Easy customization and changes like that (literally, "on spot") is the biggest selling point of scripting languages. Can you do it in Arduino? Yes, you can. Arduino is kind of subset of C++ to make it more like scripting language, but still compiled (because AVR microcontroller used in the original Arduino couldn't host an advanced scripting language, but people didn't care even back then, and wanted to run it nonetheless: https://github.com/billroy/bitlash https://github.com/billroy/bitlash). So, just keep that compiler/IDE around (on your tablet? phone?) if you want to tweak it. Is it big problem? Nope, but should give an idea why people look towards scripting languages which allow to have even less problems. How MicroPython will be better? Well, we seriously consider Python to be more advanced language overall (while more suited for hardware programming). And I'm a long-time esp8266 hacker with bunch of ideas how to get more from the chip, just looking for a good excuse (like, people actually needing it) to implement them.