Wirth's Law - Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster | Hacker News Reader

Wirth's Law - Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster

en.wikipedia.org

40 pointsdedalus8 comments

"The speed of software halves every 18 months."

So true.

Few anecdotal experiences.

Visual Studio 2008 (express), installation space required was few hundred megs. You clicked on a .cpp file and the IDE would launch immediately.

Today you have Visual Studio 2015, which requires +10gb of space and takes so fricken long time to launch that if you double click on that same .cpp file now, by the time the IDE launches you're already 10 minutes into some other task and have already forgotten why that IDE opens up now.

Another example, Windows XP. Heck, you can just install it in a VM today for example, give it half a gig of ram and boot it. And observe, it's blitzing fast! From boot to login takes no time!

Try the same with Win10. "Preparing to login in, please wait", "please wait this", "please wait that", "preparing to configure this/that", etc. blah blah and for what?

Is there something that I couldn't do in WinXP that I can now do in Win10? How about VS? Honestly I don't know, I'm doing all the same computational tasks now that I was doing back in the WinXP era.

And the Open Source Linux community is not redeemed either. Anyone tried any recent Ubuntu with Unity. The master of sluggishness.

Thank god you can always still install ArchLinux + Fluxbox and not deal with the bloat.

This is exactly why I decided to get a Chromebook and install Linux (Gallium OS) on it rather than get a Windows 10 laptop (Macbooks are too expensive for me right now).

I wanted a Windows computer initially, but I just had to return my Windows 10 laptop after growing frustrated with how unbelievably slow it was. It was ridiculous. Windows 10 is an abomination. My $230 CB5-571 is doing just fine.

I will say, though, that Microsoft Office is unrivaled in my opinion, and it's unfortunate that it's not compatible with Linux. Still, Google Drive has served me well so far.

Fuzz's Corrollary:

Web experience gets slower more quickly than the software does.

Anecdotal evidence:

Average website loading and/or navigation (speed, success), on average consumer desktops & broadband connections, now seems to underperform the average W9x PC having IE5 and 56K dial-up at the time.

"The faster you go the slower you get there around here" -Fuzzy Berra

That's because people think it's a great idea to include 10MB of different javascript frameworks that cause the page to rerender itself 15 times as each component loads.

That said, the modern browser isn't slower itself. If you load a page from 10 years ago in edge/chrome it will render almost instantly in most cases.

I'm pretty sure (but, memory) I heard the following before Wirth's law was coined as Wirth's law: "Grove giveth and Gates taketh away."

http://www.quotes-inspirational.com/quote/grove-giveth-gates...

It is true but then there are also counter examples:

- iOS moving to incremental over the air updates

- OS X getting a little slower but certainly less than the speedup provided through SSDs

- Angular2 and React being faster than Angular 1

- Move from VMs to containers

I feel on the OS and application side developers are aware of constraints and acting responsibly. Can't say the same of what can be seen on the internet. HN being the exception of course.

Wouldn't it be great if we had to use the finicky featureless software of the 70s forever and ever? Then the normies wouldn't feel welcome using computers and we could be hygiene-free wizards of the arcane again. Oh boy.

Which is to say, this is reductive bullshit based on biases. Boring, boring, boring.

If you are trying to make a case that software has to be bloated to be easy to use and not crash, it is pure ridiculous nonsense. Virtual memory, libraries and better tools are the reason software is better now. Did you ever use uTorrent before it was bought?

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