They're not that amenable to the abstraction of C. Companies have managed to create C compilers for PICs anyway because there's a market for them, but they have

They're not that amenable to the abstraction of C. Companies have managed to create C compilers for PICs anyway because there's a market for them, but they have - amongst other problematic features - bank switching for RAM and register access, extremely limited support for indirect addressing, no hardware support for function pointers, a hardware stack with limited depth that cannot be accessed directly, only implicitly via call and return instructions. Someone elsewhere in the thread mentioned using a compiler that didn't support recursion; that's probably because there's no easy way of supporting stack variables on most PICs.