wirths-lawlisted

# Wirth's Law > "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster." > — Niklaus Wirth, 1995 ## The core idea Moore's Law gives hardware a doubling of capability roughly every two years. Wirth's Law observes a counteracting trend: software grows in size, complexity, and resource consumption at a rate that outpaces — or at least keeps pace with — hardware improvements. The result: users often don't experience the performance gains that Moore's Law would suggest they should. A more colorful formulation is "Andy and Bill's Law" (from the industry): "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away" — referring to Intel's Andy Grove and Microsoft's Bill Gates. Every gain in hardware capability gets absorbed by software demanding more. ## Why software grows slower **Abstraction layers accumulate.** Modern applications run on layer after layer of abstraction: operating system, runtime, virtual machine, framework, library, application. Each layer has overhead. The early app that ran directly on hardware is now wrapped in multiple interpreters and runtimes. **Developer time is expensive; compute is cheap.** As hardware got cheaper, the economic incentive shifted from "write efficient code" to "write code faster." Higher-level languages, garbage collection, dynamic typing, interpreted execution — all trade runtime performance for developer productivity. Rational choice, but the cumulative effect is significant resource consumption. **Feature creep.** Software adds features over time. Mo