On Thu, 4 Jul 2024, Adam Thornton wrote:

> ARM or one of the smaller RISC-V flavor-sets (RISC-V is super-modular) 
> would be a perfectly reasonable architecture to learn these days.  After 
> the PDP-11 but before ARM I'd'a suggested 68000.  Definitely NOT x86 and 
> its betentacled descendants.  Even so, you'd still want to treat it (if 
> you're learning "how do computers work?") as if it were not superscalar, 
> even though it obviously is.  Which I guess is pushing me into "please 
> let me just pretend it's a PDP-11 and keep all the scary pipelining and 
> speculative execution and all the things that are hard to reason about 
> below the layer where I need to care" territory.

Pretty much anything with a linear address space, an orthogonal 
instruction set, and a stack will do, I think.

Was it John Gilmore who said "Segment registers are for worms"?

I dips me lid to those souls who implemented ALGOLW on the 360...

> And yeah, if you need me to sweep the floors, I'll sweep the floors, but 
> if I'm needed to sweep the floors often, there's a management problem 
> here, in that you can hire people who are much better at sweeping floors 
> than I am for much less money than you hired me to do software 
> engineering for.

I've worked in places where I've swept the floor (and also did the dishes 
etc); I'll still need to be paid the same salary, though :-)

-- Dave