In my opinion, having a single ISA breeds lazyness, and causes shortcuts to be made in programming. Like when the whole world got rid of all those esoteric 18-bit-word and worse architectures, and started writing loads of C for 32-bit i386. Then 64-bit came along and loads of software wouldn't compile properly without fixing things like assumptions of integer size, etc.
It's why I am very glad that while Linux is very popular, there is still a BSD keeping programmers from going too crazy on the Linux-only features.
We don't know what future architecture will exist. I would rather we have a multitude of architectures now, so that people write standards-conforming code rather than it-works-on-amd64/Linux code.
The 18- ad 36-bit architectures weren't esoteric at the time! Though may of them also had bad (outdated, and not-obviously bad at the time) ideas like one's complement arithmetic. Machines like the PDP-10 were a pleasure to program in assembly, but I haven't written a line of assembly code in over a decade.
But I agree the world is full of "slap it together and if it runs once, ship it" software -- that's what gave us Y2K. Time to re-read worse is better.
In retrospect, it's amazing how older games like Age of Empires work so well and (almost) bug free from the get go. In the software development environment for late 90s the amount of work to making sure that it works (without crashing!) is amazing.
With extreme logging now our team still throws a bunch of internal errors today, granted our team is much smaller but still, those older games are amazing.
> In my opinion, having a single ISA breeds lazyness, and causes shortcuts to be made in programming.
Aren't you aware that lazyness is one of the great virtues of a programmer?
> Then 64-bit came along and loads of software wouldn't compile properly without fixing things like assumptions of integer size, etc.
Yes, now you just write code with the assumption that a word is 4 or 8 bytes, you don't concern yourself with the case where the word is four triganic nibbles long.
It's why I am very glad that while Linux is very popular, there is still a BSD keeping programmers from going too crazy on the Linux-only features.
We don't know what future architecture will exist. I would rather we have a multitude of architectures now, so that people write standards-conforming code rather than it-works-on-amd64/Linux code.