[AYBABTME]

fwiw the VM's instruction set seems just fine, the problem entirely lies within the crap programming languages available at this time. This seems to all be fixable if someone comes around and designs a language that makes it harder to shoot yourself in the foot.

[UncleMeat]

The VM also has severe problems. Whether or not you are required to check exceptions at a call site depends on how you call a function, for example. It also does not have a monotonically increasing time value, since operations are allowed to manipulate the clock time up to some value.