Despite a wealth of tutorials for setting up and writing code for the ESP8266 WiFi module, there has not been much of anything on programming this cheap wireless module with the Arduino IDE.

As the Arduino platform evolves it will keep pin compatibility in order to support the older shields. And if they choose a different microcontroller the Arduino IDE will still compile the same ...

Microcontroller ... Arduino systems have a relatively lower learning curve than conventional analog embedded systems, with the highly intuitive Arduino IDE simplifying many programming tasks.

Meanwhile, the Arduino family consists mostly of microcontrollers ... to program the Arduino board by connecting it to another PC and manually creating C/C++ codes using the Arduino IDE.