&gt; I don&#x27;t see how &quot;a lot of money was invested&quot; proves how there is no alternate hardware that would make programming more productive.<p>Couldn&#x27;t maybe the reason for not understanding be not knowing enough about the theoretical and practical aspects of the hardware development? How about suggesting any reasonable direction for improvement? Practically everybody who&#x27;s involved with hardware and software constantly tries to make something better, somehow you posit that all of them are wrong for doing what they are doing?<p>It&#x27;s simple: people propose, sometimes also implement the &quot;alternate hardware.&quot; Hardware evolves to the demands, what we have is a result of the evolution. Unsuccessful fail, successful survive. Success is measured in people being ready to invest billions just to be able to produce a new generation of the CPUs, because that&#x27;s how much it costs. There&#x27;s no cheaper known way. If you invent something better than the existing state, and it&#x27;s provably and significantly better, it is going to be accepted. That&#x27;s how we have today ARM, that&#x27;s how we don&#x27;t use Itanium, that&#x27;s why Intel uses some technology developed by AMD. The leading position of Intel x32 and AMD x64 architectures on the desktops and servers was decided exactly because it was &quot;easier&quot; to program them compared to some other solutions (and the computations were also faster). ARM dominates for having some specific other advantages. All aspects, including these you recognized as important, are actually factored in the success of the current hardware.<p>&gt;  the main point is that he was making tradeoffs for his math machine, not for modern software development<p>And this doesn&#x27;t mean that people just blindly reproduced what he did during the following 150-something years. Instead, just like he did, people constantly questioned what they did and decided based on the limitations they had, just like he. His design was more &quot;mentioned&quot; than actually used. It&#x27;s the opposite, once more or less independent development recognizes which ideas are the &quot;best&quot; in the given time and the given limitations, people who study the old research recognize that the same ideas were considered or even followed in some older designs. Now we have enough experience that we can study the failed and successful attempts that already answer some questions somebody new to the field can have.<p>&gt; I have definitely a lot to learn about writing.<p>If you write about the possibility of a &quot;better hardware&quot; familiarizing more with the computer hardware and the theoretical and practical basis and limitations would help not sounding uneducated. Rules are to be broken, the &quot;well known truths&quot; are to be questioned to make a change, but the questioning has to be based on some knowledge, when it&#x27;s in the field where so much is dependent on the knowledge.