5 Jul
2024
5 Jul
'24
1:36 p.m.
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