I think the idea is that if you have a useful script, you can set it up here just once and it's automatically wrapped with an HTTP-based interface so you can use it like an API. Now you can use that script from any Internet-connected device, with basically zero setup on each device. I'm not sure if I can think of something I'd want to use it for, but this is an interesting idea and a great proof-of-concept implementation.
I think perhaps the most interesting part of this is that they're apparently spinning up/down Python (and other languages) sandbox environments on the fly, nearly instantaneously.
But why not just use the script directly on that device? Since the interfaces to the "API" are things like Python, Ruby, QJuery etc, you still need your internet connected device to be running an actual scripting language. At which point, you might as well just script it locally rather than proxying through a (potentially insecure) connection to a remote server on the internet to run it for you. I just don't understand the benefit?
The APIs only have a single interface, and that is HTTP. All the examples are just different ways of making an HTTP request, whether through the curl command or a full-blown language. Hitting this API has only one requirement: something capable of making HTTP requests.
Running the script directly requires a correctly-configured environment for each scripting language you want to support on each device. If a script has additional dependencies or libraries, those must also be installed locally if you want to run the script locally. By putting the script behind an HTTP API, it just needs to be correctly configured once on a single device (the API server), and then the requirement for using the script on all other devices is just plain old HTTP.
Suppose you have five different scripts each written in a different language (because languages have their own strengths and weaknesses). And suppose you need to run all of these scripts on three completely different devices (say, a phone, a laptop, and an Arduino). If you want to run the scripts directly on each device, then you need to set up 5*3=15 runtime environments and make sure they all function correctly (and don't break with updates). To save effort, it might make sense to put these scripts behind an HTTP API, and then just use simple HTTP requests from each device to access all scripts in a uniform manner. Note that in reality, you'll probably want to be targeting much more than three devices, so the savings can stack up quickly.
I think perhaps the most interesting part of this is that they're apparently spinning up/down Python (and other languages) sandbox environments on the fly, nearly instantaneously.