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> In otherwords (surprise, surprise), there are tradeoffs, and
> different choices may be appropriate in different circumstances.
> This is also just one person's or organization's view.

I did note that, and ask for more sources...

> I think that is jumping to a conclusion too quickly.  Computer
> architecture is quite an envolved field that people spend their
> entire careers on.

Fair enough.

> I
> don't think you will find wide agreement that any one architecture
> is "best", whether easily programmable by humans or not.  Borroughs
> used to make a line of machines that did use a stack model.  They
> were reasonably successful for a while.  HP calculators are famous
> for using a stack model. That's what I use personally.  (I have two
> HP 11C calculators that are now 20 years old and still in active
> use).
>
> However, other intelligent people have evaluated architectures and
> not chosen stack-based.  I don't think that the supposed difficulty
> of programming them in assembler is legitimate factor.  This would
> have been far more true in Borroughs' time, but today general
> purpose CPUs are programmed in high level languages.

I am not entirely sure that that is not simply a carry-over from days
past.  I.e. people still don't use x processor architecture because
people just don't use that architecture.  Sometimes that happens.
Not always, but in some cases, that's the reasoning.

> I think there is a lot more to the architectural tradeoffs than the
> little presented here.  Developing a new machine is an expensive
> enterprise, so this sort of thing gets studied very carefully by
> experts.  Occasionally something dubious does make it to market, or
> a strange arhchitecture evolves over time due to compatibility
> concerns.  However, I would at least start out assuming that
> choices were carefully made and only decide otherwise after
> collecting sufficient information to make the case.

I agree that there is a lot more to it.  These were conclusions based
on a single application (that of the programable state machine).
And, just a note:  Developing a new machine is not that expensive
with the use of FPGAs.  It is expensive only in terms of time.  And
high level languages to describe the flow of the device make the
development time somewhat shorter.

As to dubious things making it to the market, I have been told,
though I am uncertain as to the validity of the source, that the x86
architecture is pretty awful.  A similar source once told me that the
architecture of the Intel processors would be a limiting factor in
their attainable maximum speed, and that the AMD architecture (which
is different though it uses an almost identical instruction set, or
so I am told) is slightly better, though hampered by the klunky
instruction set.  I don't know whether to believe this or not, but
there it is.

- --Brendan

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