Software Bloat Outpaces Hardware Performance Gains

This analysis revisits Niklaus Wirth's 1995 essay 'A Plea for Lean Software' and argues that software complexity has increased faster than hardware performance since the 1980s. It cites Dan Luu's 2017 input-lag measurements (Apple IIe baseline, 1983) and traces how cloud adoption by 2010 and added abstraction layers raised latency and operational costs while enabling web scale.