The Arduino IDE is, of course, based on the Processing one which was designed to let artists do computational art.

Hardware brings more low level gory details, and someone has to know them - for example library authors for kit that needs low level access to interrupts like the couple of multiplexing LED shields I have - but hiding them from users is, in a sense, in the Arduino's DNA.

If it doesn't need one of those libraries, I use Forth as it's designed for interactive debugging on the hardware.