[jsjohnst]

> You can find many people singing it's praises, including me.

Until today, I’ve never once seen someone “singing it’s praises” that’s actually written code for one. At best, they’d curse it under their breath while saying it had its benefits. Usually however it was a full throated rant about how bad the experience was.

[kevml]

It was surprisingly useful for some high performance computing niches. It was in a weird time. FPGAs were available but weren’t as performant as they are today. GPUs were around but not nearly as powerful or flexible given some workloads.

[djmips]

Every single one of them came out a better coder. They might have been dragged kicking and screaming to the multi-core but they would've had to get there in the end.

[jsjohnst]

> Every single one of them came out a better coder.

Sure that may be true, but that does not mean they are singing its praises either.

Just look at this very post on HN where folks who’ve written code for it have commented on the experience, how many would you say are:

- singing its praises (you)

- cursing it under their breath while saying it had its benefits (few)

- full throated rant about how bad the experience was (few)

[djmips]

IDK - I guess most experienced low level coders hate computers, it doesn't matter what the CPU. People are lazy. I understand that it was hard but it doesn't make it a WORST CPU EVER MADE