My notion of ergonomic mostly comes from programming the Amiga in 68000 and then moving to the PC and being horrified by x86!
In 68k you had 8 32-bit data registers, (d0-d7) and 8 address registers (a0-a7)
If you wanted to access bytes or 16 or 32 bits you could do so like this:
move.w #123,d0 ; move 16bit number into d0
move.b #123,d1 ; move byte into d1
move.l #SOME_ADDRESS,a0; set address reg a0 to point to a memory location.
move.b d1,(a0) ; move contents of d1 to memory location a0 is pointing to.
Nice and easy to work with and remember.
On x86, thanks to its long and convoluted history you have all kinds of doubled up registers which you have to refer to by different names depending on what you are doing, and tons of historical cruft.
On top of the CPU, the old home computers had no historical cruft and it was very easy to talk to the hardware or system firmware; usually you'd just be getting and setting data at fixed memory locations. I can read an Amiga mouse click in one line of 68k. I've no idea how you'd do it on a modern PC or even Java! Modern systems just aren't as integrated, for better and worse.
Assembly language was also part of mainstream programming back then. You'd learn Basic then go straight to assembly if you wanted to do anything serious. So there were computer magazine articles on assembly, childrens books[1]. My first assembler, Devpac, came from a magazine coverdisk with a tutorial from Bullfrog, Peter Molyneaux's old game company[2].
So there were a whole range of cultural and technical reasons for assembly language being much more of a human-useable technology back in the day.
>It's just the external Tower of Babel from boot to usability has got a lot larger.
Yes I agree, I kinda miss being able to see the ground, which is probably why I find retro programming so appealing.
In 68k you had 8 32-bit data registers, (d0-d7) and 8 address registers (a0-a7)
If you wanted to access bytes or 16 or 32 bits you could do so like this:
Nice and easy to work with and remember.On x86, thanks to its long and convoluted history you have all kinds of doubled up registers which you have to refer to by different names depending on what you are doing, and tons of historical cruft.
On top of the CPU, the old home computers had no historical cruft and it was very easy to talk to the hardware or system firmware; usually you'd just be getting and setting data at fixed memory locations. I can read an Amiga mouse click in one line of 68k. I've no idea how you'd do it on a modern PC or even Java! Modern systems just aren't as integrated, for better and worse.
Assembly language was also part of mainstream programming back then. You'd learn Basic then go straight to assembly if you wanted to do anything serious. So there were computer magazine articles on assembly, childrens books[1]. My first assembler, Devpac, came from a magazine coverdisk with a tutorial from Bullfrog, Peter Molyneaux's old game company[2].
So there were a whole range of cultural and technical reasons for assembly language being much more of a human-useable technology back in the day.
>It's just the external Tower of Babel from boot to usability has got a lot larger.
Yes I agree, I kinda miss being able to see the ground, which is probably why I find retro programming so appealing.
[1]https://archive.org/details/machine-code-for-beginners [2]https://archive.org/details/amigaformat39/page/n61