Talk:Wirth's law

Origin of the law

In the article on Niklaus Wirth, it says:

In 1995, he popularized the adage now known as Wirth's law: "Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster", although in his 1995 paper A Plea for Lean Software he attributes it to Martin Reiser.

Should this citation be in this article as well? --Dennette 19:48, 13 January 2007 (UTC)

I serious doubt this is not POVed or sophismatic

programmers are further and further divorced from the machine and closer and closer to the software user's needs

The software bloat comes from providing a ready solution for every conceivable problem that a computer operator might need solved

This implies that our society is becoming more integrated and able to take advantage of technology, increasing efficiency and productivity in the global economy. Thus Wirth's law being true, does not necessarily indicate that value has been mysteriously lost in modern software. It does indicate that there is room for improvement.

signed: KSM-2501ZX, IP address:= 200.155.188.7 15:34, 5 August 2007 (UTC)

Societal implications?

"This implies that our society is becoming more integrated and able to take advantage of technology, increasing efficiency and productivity in the global economy. Thus Wirth's law being true does not necessarily indicate that value has been mysteriously lost in modern software. It does indicate that there is room for improvement."

I'm not sure there's any implication period, let alone one about the "integratedness of society". But the second part about some other value (application integration, inter-software communication overhead, &c.) being unrepresented in the Law's focus on "speed" is important. jsled 03:49, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

references

I've replaced several fact tags in this article. This article is completely unreferenced; the single reference provided (The School Of Niklaus Wirth, which I'll call "TSoNW") has no index, though I've thumbed through my copy searching for any statement of this "law". The book isn't written by Wirth; it is a collection of papers about Wirth and his works. One of the papers (about 10 of the book's 260 pages) was written by Wirth himself.

I'm directly questioning the validity of the article, as I can't find anything to substantiate that Wirth put any of this together. Further, I don't think we can call this a "law"; it's obviously just an observation and not a law in any legal or scientific sense. Further, there are several assertions in the article which are unreferenced. I had marked these with {{fact}} tags, but they were removed with the comment that "a citation on Wirth having said this will be sufficient". I disagree with this comment factually and semantically. The article states that "sometimes programmers even rely on Moore's law to justify writing slow code", but it presents this as an unconditional fact; it does not say that Wirth said it, or used it as a supposition in developing his so-called "law". If these statements are what Wirth said, then they should be attributed to him as quotes, not provided in the article as global truths.

It's not too hard to find attributions in literature referencing this "law", but I can find nothing which tells us that Wirth said it, or explains his basis for calling it a law. -- Mikeblas (talk) 23:09, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

It is called a law because it is commonly referred to as such, in the same sense that Moore's law, or Murphy's law. I have added a couple of citations. The matter of writing slow code is an unconditional fact, though may be mentioned in the article. High level languages, garbage collection, P-Code, etc. all cut execution efficiency to reduce programming effort. A commonplace observation, but citations could undoubtedly be found. Zodon (talk) 01:26, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Example

The example given (the 64bit stuff needing clunkier operating systems), apart from being totally unsubstantiated (it smells really bad to me, too), doesn't strike me as an example of this bit of lore. Wirth appears to be referring to coincidental slow-downs in software, not slow-downs caused by hardware.89.167.221.131 (talk) 02:12, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

The example should be removed as it is unrelated to Wirth's law. Wirth was concerned with software efficiency in the face of expansive program size ("bloat"). The cited example implies that software bloat is caused by hardware improvement. The example is wrong and anti-thetical to the topic. 173.75.43.246 (talk) 02:11, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Gates' Law

The detail for Gates' law now swamps the subject article. I'm dubious of the relevance, substance and authenticity of "Gates' Law". I recommend that the whole section should be deleted. However, if it is considered justified, a new Wikipedia entry should be made for Gates' law and, possibly, just a link to it be added here.Chris Burrows (talk) 22:56, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

How is it not relevant? It seems reasonable to call it a variant for Wirth's law. They both say that software gets slower while hardware gets faster.

I see no point in a separate article, since they are so close to the same thing that they may just be alternative names for the same observation.

Since this is an encyclopedia, alternative formulations or derivations of the same idea should be covered in one article (rather than a dictionary which would give distinct coverage to similar items with different names).

If some of the material seems of questionable verifiability, might put in fact tags. Zodon (talk) 06:02, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Page's Law

I am proposing the merger of Page's Law into Wirth's Law. Page's Law is essentially the same as Gates's Law, which is contained within this article. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bwzeiher (talk • contribs) 19:12, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

I disagree. This is becoming ridiculous - how many others are going to claim ownership of this 'law'???

http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/05/29/pages-law-try-wirths-law-or-gatess/ Chris Burrows (talk) 02:40, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree with Chris Burrows that the claims to ownership are ridiculous, but I think that's all the more reason to merge them into one place. Support the merge. DJ Clayworth (talk) 13:32, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

Reiser's Law

I propose the whole article be renamed to 'Reiser's Law' and a redirect to it be created for 'Wirth's Law'. In 1992 in the preface of 'Project Oberon' (Niklaus Wirth and Jurg Gutknecht, ACM Press, ISBN 0-201-54428-8) it was stated:

"With the Oberon System, we wish to refute Reiser's Law, which has been confirmed by virtually all recent releases of operating systems. That is, despite great leaps forward, hardware is becoming faster more slowly than software is becoming slower."

Chris Burrows (talk) 07:49, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

We should of course title the article with the name it is most commonly known by. "Wirth's law" gets ten times as many hits as "Reiser's law" (many of the latter being unrelated), so it would seem that Wirth's Law wins. However I also find that "Page's law" gets one hundred times as many hits as "Wirth's Law", even though he first used the phrase only a few months ago. Of course I could be cynical and wonder if that was because of the search tool I was using... DJ Clayworth (talk) 18:28, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

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From "Big Iron" days of IBM

No matter how good the hardware engineers are, the software boys piss it all away. NickyMcLean (talk) 12:37, 19 August 2018 (UTC)