That could be interesting. I gave up after fortran, cobol, pascal, and a bit of c. I learned basic on an old vic20 hooked up to a 13" b&w television set - I thought I was an astronaut when I coupled it to a thermal okidata color printer and replaced the cassette drive with a floppy the size of a microwave.
Programming a controller in C is no harder than basic for an old VIC 20 :-)
It’s a LOT cheaper though.
You need a PC to run the free C compiler and IDE on and a <10.00 USB programmer to write data to the controller and that’s about it.