Wirth's law

References

• Wirth's Law Wikipedia Article

Notes

Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, a computer scientist who discovered it in his 1995 article A Plea for Lean Software.

Wirth attributed the saying to Martin Reiser, who in preface to his book on the Oberon System wrote: The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness. This trend of noticing was started as early as 1987.

He states that two contributing factors to the acceptance of ever-growing software as rapidly growing hardware performance and customers' ignorance of features that are essential versus nice-to-have. Enhanced user convenience and functionality supposedly justify the increased size of software, but Wirth argues that people are increasingly misinterpreting complexity as sophistication, that these details are cute but not essential, and they have a hidden cost. As a result, he calls for the creation of leaner software and pioneered the development of Oberon, a software system developed between 1986 and 1989 based on nothing but hardware. Its primary goal was to show that software can be developed with a fraction of the memory and processor power usually required, without sacrificing flexibility, functionality, or user convenience.

The law was restated in 2009 and attributed to Google co-founder Larry Page. May's Law, named after David May, is a variant stating: Software efficiency halves every 18 months, compensating Moore's law.