Wirth's law
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Wirth's law in computing was made popular by Niklaus Wirth in 1995. There are two slightly different versions and it is unclear which was the original form, or where the law actually originated. The law states
or
- Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating.
Hardware is clearly getting faster over time, and some of that development is quantified by Moore's law; Wirth's law points out that this does not imply that work is actually getting done faster. Programs tend to get bigger and more complicated over time, and sometimes programmers even rely on Moore's law to justify writing slow code, thinking that it won't be a problem because the hardware will get faster anyway.
As an example of Wirth's law, one can observe that booting a modern PC with a modern operating system usually takes longer than it did to boot a PC five or ten years ago.
Software is being used to create software. By using Integrated Development Environments, Compilers and Code Libraries, programmers are further and further divorced from the machine and closer and closer to the software user's needs. This results in many layers of interpretation which take a complex requirement in human understandable form and convert it into a very large number of the extremely limited set of instructions that can be performed by a computer. The software-bloat comes from providing a ready solution for every conceivable problem that a computer operator might need solved.
This implies that our society is becoming more integrated and able to leverage on technology, increasing efficiency and productivity in the global economy. Thus Wirth's law being true, does not necessarily indicate that value has been mysteriously lost in modern software. It does indicate that there is room for improvement.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- The School of Niklaus Wirth: The Art of Simplicity by László Böszörményi, Jürg Gutknecht, and Gustav Pomberger (Editors), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2000, ISBN 1-55860-723-4.
