There is C available for an 8051. The Keil 8051 compiler (now owned by ARM) was pretty good and it had a nice GUI environment. The 8051 is pretty good for certa

There is C available for an 8051. The Keil 8051 compiler (now owned by ARM) was pretty good and it had a nice GUI environment. The 8051 is pretty good for certain tasks but when you push it beyond the limits, your effort switches from solving the core problem to managing memory and micro optimization to make things work. Meanwhile with an ARM MCU you don't have to worry about a lot of things. I once spent a couple days optimizing a 32-bit divide for an 8051 to squeeze a couple % improvement in product performance.