x86 is clearly not a beautiful ISA, but it is not as black as it is painted. The first thing that one should understand is large parts of the encoding of the instructions make a lot more sense once one writes them down in octal instead of hexadecimal (something even the Intel people who wrote the reference manual seem to have missed):
...that really doesn't help with the issues I have: the instruction set is an absolutely ugly jumble of almost 40 years of religious backwards compatability, odd hacks, and various extensions.
Although POSIX and HTML5 hold up a bit better than Win32 and C++, IMHO. Especially POSIX (it's not great, but it works pretty well).
But I've heard X11 is absolutely miserable, so the windows folks don't have a monopoly on satanically evil APIs with religious backwards-compatability.
It helps to have actual real life experience under your belt when making such claims. You seem to be parroting what countless rants have already repeated without much content.
The GP didn't have much content either, merely listing off other obsessively backwards compatible things. Your reply might be suitable in a formal debate setting (as would "fallacy!" claims be suitable when challenging faulty deductive logic) but this isn't a debate, it's a conversation. The source of one's claims doesn't matter, you only know they're probably not from experience because the Parent was kind enough to share their age. The claims are used to drive the conversation and establish a shared context for further conversation (or at least ranting about the shape of our industry), not to debate.
Also reading the hard-won experience of others is much more efficient than trying to get it yourself. Books are wonderful. With enough books you can advance beyond the authors without having to tread the same paths, you parrot their findings as a base for your own. Or another case, you can at least be aware of common pitfalls your senior coworkers are constantly falling into because of an aversion to reading. Why do you know the pitfall is there? You're just parroting back what a book said. That doesn't make it untrue, or not useful to know, or not useful to share with other people, or even not useful to bring up to show there's a shared context.
Given, I'm fairly weak in assembler (I've been learning), so I may not be the most reliable resource: GP has a point about my lack of experience, just not for the reason they think they do.
Probably because not breaking programs registers a lot higher on most people's priority list than making it easier to write -- especially when we're talking about assembly, which hardly anyone writes in the first place.
Everything you wrote is actually correct, so I'm really not sure why you're being voted down, but it's a behavioral pattern I've noticed on HN in general: write anything that's not high praise or in any way disagrees with what's popular and expect to be brutally censored. It really has me contemplating ditching HN altogether, if all we're ever going to do here is stroke eachothers' egos and pander to popular trends. And here I thought the point of HN was stimulating discussion.
It's not the worst. There are far worse places. And this sort of problem appears in all forums, but especially voting-based systems like HN (the "internet points" problem).
As forums go, HN is far from the worst. But it could be better.
x86 is clearly not a beautiful ISA, but it is not as black as it is painted. The first thing that one should understand is large parts of the encoding of the instructions make a lot more sense once one writes them down in octal instead of hexadecimal (something even the Intel people who wrote the reference manual seem to have missed):
> http://www.dabo.de/ccc99/www.camp.ccc.de/radio/help.txt