BASIC is NOT dead!!

[dhouston]

ESPBasic does appear simple but I would prefer to know more about what's going on behind the curtain. The interpreter seems to be doing a great deal that is hidden and is undocumented. From the documentation I've seen, it isn't clear that you are accessing an NTP server - it might be the Wizard of Oz. Plus, it seems to require a great deal and ever growing amount of memory - more than 1M in the latest version. Still, it may well be useful for augmenting PIC based devices where you just want to add WiFi connectivity.

ZBasic is compiled (i.e. no interpreter) so only your compiled application uses memory. ZBasic also works with most Atmel AVR chips, can import/export C, can import Arduino code, use inline assembly language and much, much more. The free version supports the ESP8266. With something like the NodeMCU v1.0 (4M), many applications will have no need for a PIC or AVR relying instead on the processing power of the ExpressIf SoC.

[dhouston]

While programmable with LUA, Arduino, ZBasic, ESP8266Basic and more, one drawback of the ESP8266, to quote email from Don Kinzer who created ZBasic, is...

It doesn't have any means to do highly accurate timing. Further, the ESP8266 has non-maskable interrupts and servicing them also interferes
with the timing.

This means you will need a PIC or other MCU to supplement the ESP8266 for many, many applications.

Here's a bit of hardware that simplifies that...
http://www.wemos.cc/wiki/doku.php?id=en:d1_mini

You can design shields that stack atop it a la Arduino.