That doesn't seem right to me. If the problem is that it has too many instructions and addressing modes, you can decide to only use a small subset of those instructions and addressing modes, which really isn't much of a handicap for implementing functionality. (It doesn't help with analyzing existing code, but neither does a powerful assembler.)
I'm no expert on assembly-language programming, but probably 90% of the assembly I write on i386, amd64, RISC-V, and ARM is about 40 instructions: ldr, mov, bl, cmp, movs, push, pop, add, b/jmp, bl/blx/call, ret, str, beq/jz, bne/jnz, bhi/ja, bge/jge, cbz, stmia, ldmia, ldmdb, add/adds, addi, sub/subs, bx, xor/eor, and, or/orr, lsls/shl, lsrs/sar/shr, test/tst, inc, dec, lea, and slt, I think. Every once in a while you need a mul or a div or something. But the other 99% of the instruction set is either for optimized vectorized inner loops or for writing operating system kernels.
I think that the reason that i386 assembly (or amd64 assembly) is error-prone is something else, something it has in common with very simple architectures and instruction sets like that of the PDP-8.
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That doesn't seem right to me. If the problem is that it has too many instructions and addressing modes, you can decide to only use a small subset of those instructions and addressing modes, which really isn't much of a handicap for implementing functionality. (It doesn't help with analyzing existing code, but neither does a powerful assembler.)
I'm no expert on assembly-language programming, but probably 90% of the assembly I write on i386, amd64, RISC-V, and ARM is about 40 instructions: ldr, mov, bl, cmp, movs, push, pop, add, b/jmp, bl/blx/call, ret, str, beq/jz, bne/jnz, bhi/ja, bge/jge, cbz, stmia, ldmia, ldmdb, add/adds, addi, sub/subs, bx, xor/eor, and, or/orr, lsls/shl, lsrs/sar/shr, test/tst, inc, dec, lea, and slt, I think. Every once in a while you need a mul or a div or something. But the other 99% of the instruction set is either for optimized vectorized inner loops or for writing operating system kernels.
I think that the reason that i386 assembly (or amd64 assembly) is error-prone is something else, something it has in common with very simple architectures and instruction sets like that of the PDP-8.