Wirth's law
Categories: Adages | Rules of thumb
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 from. The law states
or
- Software is slowing 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 the time it takes to boot a modern PC with a modern operating system is usually no less than the time it took to boot a PC five or ten years ago.