| >"Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law" [...] >"Niklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, wrote an article in 1995: About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much!) An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary. Were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable. Niklaus Wirth – A Plea for Lean Software" [...] >"Time pressure is probably the foremost reason behind the emergence of bulky software. Niklaus Wirth – A Plea for Lean Software And while that was true back in 1995, that is no longer the most important factor. We now have to deal with a much bigger problem: abstraction. Developers never built things from scratch, and that has never been a problem, but now they have also become lazy." [...] "The problem does not seem that big, but try to grasp what is happening here. In another tutorial that Nikola wrote, he built a simple todo-list. It works in your browser with HTML and Javascript. How many dependencies did he use? 13,000. These numbers are insane, but this problem will only keep increasing. As new, very useful libraries keep being built, the number of dependencies per project will keep growing as well. That means that the problem Niklaus was warning us about in 1995, only gets bigger over time." Related: "The Law Of Leaky Abstractions" by Joel Spolsky: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a... |