Open thread for December 9 - 16, 2013

Wirth's law is a computing adage made popular by Niklaus Wirth in 1995. It states that "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."

Is Wirth's Law still in effect? Most of the examples I've read about are several years old.

ETA: I find it interesting that Wirth's Law was apparently a thing for decades (known since the 1980s, supposedly) but seems to be over. I'm no expert though, I just wonder what changed.

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Waffle_Iron12y10

This seems to be true for video game consoles. Possibly because good graphics make better ads than short loading times.

0mwengler12y

I think both software and hardware got further out on the learning curve which means their real rates of innovative development have both slowed down which means the performance of software has sped up. I don't get how I get to the last part of that sentence from the first part either, but it almost makes sense.

0Tenoke12y

I mean, this formulation is wrong (software isn't getting slower), except for the tongue-in-cheek original interpretation I guess. On the other hand, software is getting faster at a slower rate than hardware is and that is still an important observation.

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