The PDP is remarkably similar to x86. The complaints that people have written at length about typically come down to superscalar features not being exposed in the instruction set, which means that it can't be exposed to the programming model.

On the other hand, every architecture that has tried to expose them so far has failed; nobody wants to manually apply the Tomasulo algorithm to their code, or manage shuffling data elements into and out of their cache hierarchy.

These arguments never really hold water for me. The C VM is flexible enough to apply to literally any piece of hardware with relatively few pains. For experienced systems programmers, it is also extremely easy to brain-compile C code. C++ and Rust are both much harder in this respect.

And then they discover that -O3 has nothing to do with their brain compiler.

>Yet computers are abstract concepts :-)

And food is just molecules, but we don't eat chairs because they're also molecules.