> The tooling is nearly always C

With the esp8266 and low end arm controllers, there has been an explosion of languages for embedded applications; micropython, lua, es, basic, even lisp. Particularly for beginners, this is a good thing. Having said that, the dev environments are somewhat lacking at this stage, and I'm wondering if we'll soon be at a point where they'll be enough resources to just put Linux or other OS straight onto the microcontroller.