Comment by ken
6 years ago
That's technically true but I think it misses the point. A CPU (at least an older one) is simple enough that it can be fully understood by one person. It was probably designed by a very small team. If you want to know if something works, you don't have to read thousands of pages of documentation. You can just try it. Nearly any combination of operations you put together is going to do something.
None of that is true of the big complex language/library/framework/OS stacks we have today. Most of my effort programming today is on something simple to describe in words, but complex to encode in the language's type system, or the framework's classes, or the OS's security model.
I feel that Lisp is the closest I can get to those early systems I grew up with. It's based on symbols rather than bytes but the flexibility and coherence is the same.
Today we have different systems for different needs. You can use an interpreted language like Python to get simplicity or you can use something like Rust where a program essentially doubles as proof of correctness. Strong typing is really about managing complexity as the program grows. This was never an issue on 8-bit micros because there just wasn't that much room to grow anyways.