Wirth's Law

“Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.”

— Niklaus Wirth, A Plea for Lean Software, 1995

Also known as Wirth’s Law. Complementary to Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law promised hardware doubles in power every two years. Wirth observed that software eats those gains before users see them.

Every abstraction layer. Every framework on top of a framework. Every electron bloated by convenience. The machine gets faster. The experience does not.

Wirth created Pascal and Oberon — languages built for clarity and discipline. He believed in lean, readable, purposeful code.

He was not wrong. He was just inconvenient.

“Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication.” — Niklaus Wirth