I agree Picbasic is easy, because it has support for most of the features, ADCIN,HPWM,Hserout etccc. With C you basically have to configure the registers yourself to access the hardare features. If you are not accessing the special hardware on the pic and just want to use the pic to crunch numbers then C is great.

I have problems with basic being too slow for my application, so I had to change my approach to get reasonable results. It has kind of been a blessing in disguise because now my approach is much much cleaner and requires less extra circuits. It is kind of tough to get used to picbasic being pretty slow, because in normal programming on the PC, I am so used to the hardware being so much faster than required. But sometimes an extra challenge is good and makes you think outside the box, I do not even recal the last time I needed to optimize my code to run faster on a PC.