I would love to see a comparison of instruction sets for assembly programming. Sure, only a few people are going to program in asm, but a microcontroller is the best way to play with it.
The MSP430 instruction set is somewhat friendly, but I long for the days of the Motorola MC68hc11. That was a beautiful instruction set, especially for teaching.
Does anybody know how these chips fare for raw assembly programming?
I'd guess that 8051 is the easiest. I suspect that a huge percent of 8051 is still hand-coded assembly. It has an accumulator architecture and the instructions were made with hand-coding in mind (plus, there's not very many of them). I remember it being pretty easy to learn, but that was a long time ago. To me, RISC assembly tends to be quite a bit more complicated to write by hand.
The AVR instruction set is reasonably nice for hand-coding (and has a more modern feel to it than the 'HC11, which may be relevant if you're using it as a teaching example). I haven't used PICs since the PIC14 days; it was a painfully minimalist ISA like the 6502; the newer PICs are better, I gather.
The ARM set isn't unpleasant but it's definitely a modern set designed as a compiler target rather than for hand coding, and most ARM chips are large enough there's no real reason not to use a compiler for almost all the code.
The MSP430 instruction set is somewhat friendly, but I long for the days of the Motorola MC68hc11. That was a beautiful instruction set, especially for teaching.
Does anybody know how these chips fare for raw assembly programming?