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 discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".
History
Wirth attributed the saying to Martin Reiser, who in the 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." Other observers had noted this for some time before; indeed, the trend was becoming obvious as early as 1987.He states 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...
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