This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors.
The really short version: the way we build/ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to 350MB packages that draw graphs, and simple products importing 1600 dependencies of unknown provenance.
What might be interesting is to go through some archive of old, say, accounting software and find whatever was really the best. Maybe something that ran on an IBM mainframe in the 70s or something, but got upgraded decades ago. Lo and behold we discover this software from the past (with some modern tweaks) is the best accounting software ever, and it can run amazingly on earlier node architecture that is extremely simplistic to adapt to modern architecture.
What might be interesting is to go through some archive of old, say, accounting software and find whatever was really the best. Maybe something that ran on an IBM mainframe in the 70s or something, but got upgraded decades ago. Lo and behold we discover this software from the past (with some modern tweaks) is the best accounting software ever, and it can run amazingly on earlier node architecture that is extremely simplistic to adapt to modern architecture.