Wirth's law (redirected from Wirth law)

"Software slows down faster than hardware speeds up." By Nicklaus Wirth, Swiss computer scientist, who developed Pascal as well as other programming languages. It refers to the software bloat of modern applications and operating systems. Although the CPU clock is as much as three thousand times faster than the first personal computers in the late 1970s, applications can even run slower than they did back then.

Faster, But...
If applications do run faster, the increased throughput (actual work getting done) is still nowhere near equal to the hardware improvement. For example, rendering a certain image today may be 50 times faster than back in the early days, but not several thousand times faster, which is the actual hardware multiple. See laws and software bloat.