I didn't say it was a failure, I just said it wasn't a success.
It fits a particular ecological niche, but these days there's almost no reason to do things that way. In the olden days of the early 90s when I needed to write embedded code to run on what was basically a Z80 SBC, it was easier to write a Forth for it and assemble it natively on a clunky old CP/M machine (I used a Kaypro of some sort at work, but an Osborne 1 at home) than it was to struggle on with the crappy (like, really crappy) MS-DOS cross-assembler on the PCs we had.
Now of course I could emulate every single computer in the entire company on a ten quid embedded board, all at the same time.
It fits a particular ecological niche, but these days there's almost no reason to do things that way. In the olden days of the early 90s when I needed to write embedded code to run on what was basically a Z80 SBC, it was easier to write a Forth for it and assemble it natively on a clunky old CP/M machine (I used a Kaypro of some sort at work, but an Osborne 1 at home) than it was to struggle on with the crappy (like, really crappy) MS-DOS cross-assembler on the PCs we had.
Now of course I could emulate every single computer in the entire company on a ten quid embedded board, all at the same time.