[Los Frijoles]

I personally view easyC as a form of cheating if used by already experienced programmers and skipping out on the work a bit (This is a personal view and is not necessarily shared by team 2062). I find that it is easier to program in straight C simply because programming algorithms and operations that need to be closely timed are best programmed this way.

Also, I wouldn't call writing in C hardcoding. I have had experience programming PIC Microcontrollers in Assembler and I tell you that that is hardcoding. C has many optimizations built in and memory management features that ASM compilers simply don't/can't have. Another thing: Actually learning the language that you intend to program in is more educational isn't it?

For people who are new to programming, however, easyC is the way to go as long as an effort is made to try to migrate away from easyC. Once you learn C, C++ comes easy and then more worlds of programming are opened.