A Plea for Lean Software
Software grows slower faster than hardware speeds up due to bloat
Wirth's 1995 article coined what became known as Wirth's Law: software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster. He attributed this to 'software bloat'—the tendency of applications to accumulate unnecessary code, redundant features, and overly complex architectures as developers add functionality without rigorous optimization.
The biological parallel is striking: organisms face the same pattern where capability growth gets consumed by coordination costs. Human brains, ant colonies, and complex neural systems all demonstrate that increased capability requires disproportionately increasing support infrastructure—the same pattern Wirth observed in software evolution.
Key Findings from Wirth (1995)
- Software complexity grows faster than hardware speed improvements
- Feature creep adds unnecessary code and dependencies
- Each new feature introduces additional logic and inefficiencies
- Bloat results from adding functionality without rigorous optimization