When you have a look at Philips mcu forum you will see that many, many people have big
problems with ISP programming. Forum could be renamed in 'Great Philips' ISP Forum'. At
the same time philips has begun to throw derivatives on market without releasing parallel mode
programming facility. You will not find any specifications about parallel programming.

Atmel is not better. Much of the magic of early Flash types like 89C51/2 is away, for me. ISP
programming is also complicated and not reliable. Especially if you decide to change from one to another derivative, like it was discussed in this forum.

So, seems to me that you must be a professional when working on '51?

Just oppositely when you go to PIC people. There's a pleasure arround and everthing is done
for making life easy.

Ok, that's my individual look and accept anybody else's point of view...

PICs have some big advantage: You can build small applications with extremely small number of devices. That's just important when you need something extremely space saving, like in sensor
front-ends. But if you need some peripheral chips 'bussing' with '51 is much easier.

That PICs are not only for amateurs you can see, when realizing that some runtime critical
applications are build by professionals with super fast PIC derivatives.

Bye,
Kai