One of the things that really struck me about this article was that many of these weird architectures make a lot more sense if you're programming them in assemb

One of the things that really struck me about this article was that many of these weird architectures make a lot more sense if you're programming them in assembly language (or lisp in the case of the lisp machine). It's kind of amazing how much architectural variation it's possible to abstract away with C, but maybe it's not always the best idea to do so. If I'm writing assembler, a 36-bit machine word isn't a hard concept to grasp. But if I'm writing C, the idea that my int might have 36 bits sometimes, on some platforms, and I have to code around that possibility, is a major drag. I think this article really exposes the limits of the notion of C as a portable assembler.