Wirth's law
expressionprogrammingops culture
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster.
Niklaus Wirth formalized the complaint in his 1995 essay A Plea for Lean Software, crediting the quip to Martin Reiser; it is Moore's law's shadow. Each hardware doubling gets spent on abstraction layers, frameworks, and features until the user experience stands still or regresses. Reach for it whenever a text editor needs a gigabyte to open a file the original machine could not have stored.
Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster. Niklaus Wirth's 1995 formulation is uncomfortable because the hardware improvements were real and enormous, and the user-visible experience of many everyday tasks has not improved proportionally, and in some cases has regressed.
The mechanism is not laziness either. Abstraction layers buy development speed and portability, and each one costs performance; frameworks bring capability and weight together; and the moment hardware makes something fast enough, the pressure to optimize it disappears and the freed capacity gets consumed by the next layer. Every individual decision is defensible and the aggregate is a text editor that takes longer to open than one from 1995.
The honest counterweight is that the comparison flatters the past. Modern software does far more: internationalization, accessibility, encryption, live collaboration, rendering that assumes arbitrary displays. Some of the weight is genuine capability. The critique lands anyway because a substantial part of it is not, and the discipline Wirth was arguing for, treating performance as a design constraint rather than something to be recovered later, remains the minority position.