Fair, haha. But I think the distinction intended lies in that the old CISC ISAs were complex out of a desire to provide the assembly programmer ergonomic creatu

Fair, haha. But I think the distinction intended lies in that the old CISC ISAs were complex out of a desire to provide the assembly programmer ergonomic creature comforts, backwards compatibility, etc. Today's instruction sets are designed for a world where the vast majority of machine code is generated by an optimizing compiler, not hand crafted through an assembler, and I think that was part of what the RISC revolution was about.