Nathan's laws of software

Nathan’s laws of software

Way back in 1997, Nathan Myhrvold (CTO of Microsoft at the time) wrote a paper entitled “The Next Fifty Years of Software” (Subtitled “Software: The Crisis Continues!”) which was presented at the ACM97 conference (focused on the next 50 years of computing).

Nathan Myhrvold's Laws of Software:

1. Software is a gas - it expands to fit the container it is in

2. Software grows until it becomes limited by Moore’s Law

3. Software growth makes Moore’s Law possible

4. Software is only limited by human ambition and expectation

There is a problem with modern computing called 'software bloat', which essentially means that software keeps getting larger as computer performance requirements increase. In the past, software was meticulously designed to make the most of what was available.

As time went on, computers became exponentially faster, able to hold vastly more information while reducing overall costs. This development has led to an impasse where, essentially, software is incapable of keeping up with hardware. As software becomes more complex, it is harder to manage and to find its bugs.