I built some things with Wiring back in the day (2005 through 2006-ish) and was very impressed with it. I had considered Arduino for the project, but I believe

I built some things with Wiring back in the day (2005 through 2006-ish) and was very impressed with it. I had considered Arduino for the project, but I believe I decided against it because it didn't support USB at the time. There seemed to be fundamentally different philosophies to the two projects. Arduino at the time was catering to the maker crowd--selecting only through-hole components so people could assemble their own boards without having to deal with SMD soldering. I think they didn't even sell pre-assembled boards back then. Wiring was definitely more polished, trading low cost and ease of assembly for additional features like USB. Of course now you can buy fully assembled Arduino boards and a bunch of them even use SMD components, which may be evidence validating the Wiring philosophy...