4 Jul
2024
4 Jul
'24
9:07 p.m.
On Thu, Jul 04, 2024 at 04:53:17PM +1000, Rob Pike wrote:
Architecture people: please just let me pretend your
CPU is like a
PDP-11. No surprises, OK? I'll handle the complaints about irrelevance
in the modern age.
Funny you should say that. My kid is learning how to code and I told
him to learn PDP-11 (or these days, probably ARM if that isn't all
messed up) and then pretend that everything works like that. It's
a fine mental model. Trying to develop that mental model in the
chaos that is x86_64, I'm not sure that is even possible. It would
take a long time. I think you can learn a PDP-11, as a newbie, in
a month or two.
So +1 for what Rob said.