AVR-Chat

>I suppose it 
>depends on your definition of 'straightforward' but it's hard to imagine 
>anyone who's working on a serious piece of software who would claim that 
>assembly is easier than C. 

The comment was about the devtools, not the language. A C compile/link process is inevitably more
complex than an assemble one. Poor defaults/configs can make it a lot more complex than necessary. 

>I don't think that an embedded platform is the right choice for learning 
>C. Learn C on a PC (Linux, windows, Mac, whatever) and then apply those 
>skills to develop embedded apps

NO NO NO!!!

If you want to write for embedded, learn on that, preferably via assembler first so you understand
the hardware. PC programming allows far too many bad habits to develop.