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Espruino is a JavaScript interpreter for low-power Microcontrollers. This site is both a support community for Espruino and a place to share what you are working on.
@Gordon
Ok, I'm a bit busy right now, so forgive me if I'm missing something...
You can debug by checking and setting variables, and changing code on the fly. A lot of Espruino users do this routinely using the left-hand side of the IDE.
It's actually one of the main ideas behind Espruino. If it wasn't I'd have just got the Web IDE to compile code on the PC, and Espruino would have been much faster than it currently is. However as it is, you can come back to a project, plug it in to your PC, and tweak it without even having the original source code available.
You're coming at this from the point of view of a node.js developer and assuming it's way behind Tessel because it's not what you're used to. But the reality is that they are aimed at very different areas... Tessel is going after node.js devs and that's great - but Espruino is about creating things quickly and easily without having to learn a bunch of extra tools.
Libraries changing under you is a tricky one, and yes, it is extremely frustrating.
NPM does solve that, however any solution to the problem needs to run completely in the Web Browser with extremely limited permissions. Right now you can actually program an Espruino board from your iPhone's headphone jack, from a normal website, without any special apps or software.
I'm not convinced that what you're actually suggesting will do that? If you're suggesting that everyone needs to have filesystem access, install node, npm, and a bunch of modules first then it's not an improvement at all.
Please don't do that, at least try and leverage EspruinoTools. I can pretty much guarantee that you'll lose interest in a few months, and then it'll just be sitting there on NPM along with node-espruino, grunt-espruino and espruino-cli as yet another tool that uploads 'hello world' but fails when faced with anything more complex.