Niklaus Wirth takes an interesting view on while the hardware speed is growing, the softwares are becoming “fatter” - A plea for lean software (pdf).
2 laws…
With a touch of humor, the following two laws reflect the state of the art admirably well:
- Software expands to fill the available memory. (Parkinson)
- Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.(Reiser)
Clearly, two contributing factors to the acceptance of ever-growing software are
- rapidly growing hardware performance and
- customers’ ignorance of features that are essential-versus-nice to have.
Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling-the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration.