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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Do you aspire to be a professional or are you going to settle for being an employee? I have no need to whitewash Alpert's catastrophic industry-wide legacy of technical mediocrity and failure. I suggest you aspire to honesty instead of clutching your pearls.

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Can you read the date at the top of the page? 2001. Thumb-2? And an ARM creator was interviewed as well, it is like you looked at first name on the list and just had a tantrum.

The page dates from 2010 and includes input from Gordon Bell in 2008. I see Sophie's interviewed in the article, but somehow her masterpiece — likely the most widespread architecture in the world by now — isn't included in the list at the top.

I'd be careful about giving too much credit to the original ARM design. In retrospect, like many early RISC designs, it was over-optimised for its original application. Most of the unique/novel features of the original ARM architecture turned out to be bad ideas in the long run. Most of them were later removed from the architecture, or persist only in backwards compatibility modes.

ARM is ubiquitous today more due to business models and historical accident than to inherent superiority of the design. (See also x86.)

That's interesting! Clearly that's what happened to packing the PSW into the PC†, but what other features are you thinking of?

† though there are an awful lot of ARM processors out there today that have less than 64 MiB of program memory and need their interrupts to be fast, so I'd argue it might be a reasonable idea for many applications today if it didn't involve breaking toolchain compatibility in a subtle way

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