8-bit PICs are still quite nice. All of them up to 40-pin variants are made in DIP package, so I can put a bare package into a breadboard and have a ton of feat

8-bit PICs are still quite nice. All of them up to 40-pin variants are made in DIP package, so I can put a bare package into a breadboard and have a ton of features out of the box in the right pin number configuration for the job. People should just select modern ones, and not the same old 16F84/877 or something legacy like that, that's been obsolete for like 25 years already. All of the modern ones have very uniform programming interface, nicely configurable I/O and a lot of analog features.