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A comment on Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth mastering ?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma... by fnid on Thursday December 31, 2009 @12:15PM (#1024554)
Well, that will be okay. Do you want to spend your time building the game or writing ray tracing algorithms? You want to call Array.sort(), not write a sort. It just takes up time.

It's interesting that CISC won out over RISC considering the conversation we are having. It's simpler for the builder. You can repeat yourself less. Imagine doing a quicksort in assembly. No way, right? Not today. Why?

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma... by nzmsv on Thursday December 31, 2009 @12:35PM (#1024583)
CISC won over RISC? I think you meant that in reverse :)
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Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma... by elai on Thursday December 31, 2009 @02:07PM (#1024771)
Just look at the i86/x64 instruction sets + extensions. It's rather large.
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Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma... by aaronblohowiak on Thursday December 31, 2009 @02:07PM (#1024772)
x86 is king. a terrible, ugly and far past its prime king, but king none-the-less.

Edit: The replies below are insightful, I should not have been so reductionist.

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Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma... by nzmsv on Thursday December 31, 2009 @02:56PM (#1024857)
And beneath that CISC instruction set is a RISC core and a translation layer. The fact that the instruction set is CISC has more to do with backwards compatibility (hello, Windows) than an actual advantage of CISC.
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Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma... by ssp on Thursday December 31, 2009 @10:22PM (#1025420)
It also has to do with CISC code being more compact. With memory getting slower and slower relative to the CPU, this is increasingly an (overlooked) advantage. Maybe at some point CPUs will do automatic code decompression in hardware.
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Re:Ask HN: What do you think is the next Technology worth ma... by gloob on Thursday December 31, 2009 @03:49PM (#1024950)
Until you look at anything other than PCs. I'm reasonably sure there are more ARM chips in operation than x86, and ARM is (if I recollect correctly) a RISC processor.
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