Hi guys. I've been using Great Cow Basic for 6 months to program pics and arduino mega328p uno. It's like picaxe basic but a 100 times faster and more features. Expanding hardware library and produces assembler you can see alongside the basic code. It's open source and brill.
I used pic assembler 20 years ago but it was not my idea of fun. I tried picaxe and made a robot in a week.
It wasn't until I tried to use an oled glcd and had to write the driver code and line/plot functions only to find it took a second to draw a line I realised picaxe was interpreted and slow, although it's called a Basic compiler.
I recommend trying Great Cow Basic if like me you find C difficult and Basic easy. It's code is less bloated than Arduino C. Here's a vid I did showing GLCD.