For someone like me who comes from a non-embedded background (I specialize in things like EAI, SOA, etc.) the ideas of the NodeMCU firmware are really appealing. A nice scripting language, a slick GUI for rapid prototyping (ESPlorer) together with a highly active community seemed a perfect fit.
Unfortunately it did not work for me. The whole setup was unstable and I spent many hours to get a prototype (WiFi and MQTT connection) working reliably. I failed miserably with erratic behavior of the system. Sometimes a code change was “detected”, sometimes the old code was still executed. Compiling helped often but not always.
There are others who made the same experience and obviously spent more time on trying as well as the write-up (e.g. this link). I will now experiment with the Arduino IDE extension.
I feel happy for all those people who use NodeMCU without issues and hope to rejoin them as soon as possible!