Wirth's law

expression

programmingops 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.

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