Wirth’s Law…

 

I was scooting around the net and I stumbled on a reference to Wirth’s Law and had a flashback (not Nam related) to a conversation I had about 14 years ago with my boss at the time. We were setting up the kit for a new automated warehouse solution (Oracle 7, HP 9000s and ServiceGuard if I remember correctly) and he said something along the lines of, “Why is it that for each customer we buy faster and more expensive computers, yet they take the same length of time to produce the results?”

The answer was pretty simple in that case. We were refurbishing the existing (fairly simple) warehouse as well as adding a completely new one. We were replacing some AVGs with a very complex conveyor layout, which required some difficult routing decisions. The basic “find me a space in the warehouse” decisions were replaced by pretty complex searches that had to take account of conveyor routing, system load and potentional sorting (and defragmentation) of the content in the warehouse. The customer needed a highly available solution, hence the use of ServiceGuard, so we more than doubled the hardware and software costs for no perceivable performance improvement. From the outside looking in it seemed like nothing had changed. It was still, “Here’s a pallet, put it in the racking”, but the process required to do that operation efficiently had increased in complexity manyfold.

So Wirth’s Law, “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster”, is true because people’s expectation of what software can do for them is constantly expanding, without realizing the impact those expanding expectations have on the programming and hardware requirements. Added to that we have a generation of cut & paste developers and DBAs who also don’t understand the impact their lack of understanding has on the software they develop (see Gate’s Law).

I look forward to writing a post in 10 years where I can moan about Exadata V12 boxes struggling to complete my weekly loads before the end of the weekend. Of course I will forget to qualify that I’m loading Yottabytes of data in that time… 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

4 thoughts on “Wirth’s Law…”

  1. Hi Tim,

    This reminds me about Gate’s words:
    “640kb ought to be enough for anybody”

    Actually I think that the before these days developers were very careful about how much memory they allocate, how allocate it and how to set it free. Not only memory, but how to develop so the program need less CPU cycles, use better and faster algorithms and stuff like that.

    Now because of the huge amount of resources of the computers people don’t go deep in this problem. The program will work for sure, well probably it will do the job not as the best as it can, but who cares.

    Regards,
    Sve

  2. Hi.

    Like using single letter variable names to reduce source code size. 🙂

    Cheers

    Tim…

    PS. I really like your blog theme. Very neat.

  3. Gate’s Law isn’t a Bill Gates quote. It’s just a take on Wirth’s Law with reference to commercial software. 🙂

    Cheers

    Tim…

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