Overview
There are probably more robotics frameworks than robots. Some are IA oriented, specialized in motion, in real-time, in programming language, closed or open-source: OROCOS, YARP (Yet Another Robotic Platform), Urbi, and all laboratories that develop and maintain their own framework since Aibo.
NAOqi answers to common robotics needs: parallelism, resources, synchronization, events. In NAOqi as in other frameworks we'll find generic layers but it was created on NAO and fit to the robot. NAOqi allows homogeneous communication between different modules (motion, audio, video), homogeneous programming and homogeneous information shared with ALMemory.
We're moving towards all-in-one tools: program, simulation, management... With one SDK program in script, in C++, with graphical interface, call C++ function from python, call python and C++ function from Choregraphe and simulate it.
After long discussions and nearly six months keeping compatibility with two languages, Python was preferred to Ruby for embedded interpreter. The interpreter allows standard scripting without learning a new language and allows to use numerous Python libraries (opencv, graphical extension).