alt Hacker NewsNoone uses an 8051 because it's elegant. Billions are still still sold every year because no matter if you learned it in the 70s or last week and no matter who made it, the basics are exactly alike. Software matters; ISAs don't.
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>You learned it in the 70s [emphasis mine]
I really don't know anything about this space, but you just said that 8051 is dominant because it has one dominant architecture since the 70s. It has hundreds of manufacturers making identical parts.
As you say, software matters. If the Software can't run because of hundreds of extensions that can't be checked for, then you're going to pick a target that works, no? So in fact the ISA matters most: which ISA has the most software? Which ISA means my software runs on the most devices?
Every time I've seen someone use an 8051 in the past twenty years, it's had new, bespoke software written for it. They were more used because they were a known quantity with the patents obviously dead rather than support for existing codebases.