Wirth’s law

Wirth’s law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.

It was formulated by Niklaus Wirth, the Swiss computer scientist best known for designing Pascal, in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".

The law is a counterpoint to [Moore’s law]. While transistor counts double roughly every two years, software tends to expand to consume those gains — and then some — through bloat, abstraction layers, and the prioritization of developer convenience over runtime efficiency.

Wirth’s law is closely related to [Zawinski’s law], which observes that programs expand until they can read email, and which has been interpreted as a comment on the phenomenon of [software bloat].