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).
I actually attended an internal presentation of this talk, it was absolutely riveting. Nathan's a great public speaker, maybe even better than Michael Howard :).
But an email I received today reminded me of Nathan's First Law of Software: "Software is a Gas!"
Nathan's basic premise is that as machines get bigger, the software that runs on those computers will continue to grow. It doesn't matter what kind of software it is, or what development paradigm is applied to that software. Software will expand to fit the capacity of the container.
Back in the 1980's, computers were limited. So software couldn't do much. Your spell checker didn't run automatically, it needed to be invoked separately. Nowadays, the spell checker runs concurrently with the word processor.
The "Bloatware" phenomenon is a direct consequence of Nathan's First Law.
Nathan's second law is also fascinating: "Software grows until it becomes limited by Moore's Law".
The second law is interesting because we're currently nearing the end of the cycle of CPU growth brought on by Moore's law. So in the future, the growth of software is going to become significantly constrained (until some new paradigm comes along).
His third law is "Software growth makes Moore's Law possible". Essentially he's saying that because software grows to hit the limits of Moore's law, software regularly comes out that pushes the boundaries. And that's what drives hardware sales. And the drive for ever increasing performance drives hardware manufacturers to make even faster and smaller machines, which in turn makes Moore's Law a reality.
And I absolutely LOVE Nathan's 4th law. "Software is only limited by human ambition and expectation." This is so completely true. Even back when the paper was written, the capabilities of computers today were mere pipe dreams. Heck, in 1997, you physically couldn't have a computer with a large music library - a big machine in 1997 had a 600M hard disk.
What's also interesting is the efforts in fighting Nathan's first law. It's a constant fight, waged by diligent performance people against the hoards of developers who want to add their new feature to the operating system. All the developers want to expand their features. And the perf people need to fight back to stop them (or at least make them justify what they're doing). The fight is ongoing, and unending.
Btw, check out the slides they're worth reading. Especially when he gets to the part where the stuff that makes you genetically unique fits on a 3 1/2" floppy drive.
He goes on from that point - at one point in his presentation, he pointed out that the entire human sensory experience can be transmitted easily on a 100mB ethernet connection.
Btw, for those of you who would like, there's a link to two different streaming versions of the talk here: https://research.microsoft.com/acm97/
Edit: Added link to video of talk.
Comments
Anonymous
June 17, 2005
"So in the future, the growth of software is going to become significantly constrained (until some new paradigm comes along)."
I find my self wondering if we're just not going to see a re-emergence (for lack of any better term) of a time when a small number of people could write software that took full advantage of a machine. In my limited experience it seems development has gotten much easier in the last 10 years or so. (The time period I was in college and my professional time.)
With processing capability scaling out rather than up the (currently) there is a limited number of people who can write good code that runs in parallel threads. I'd be fall down shocked to find out there isn’t a bunch of research being done around analyzing today's software to find out how to parallelize common tasks. The next step is pushing the outcome of that research into the dev tools, and then... Of course, that will prove the 4th law.Anonymous
June 17, 2005
Who puts still pictures of themselves talking in a slide show like that? I can see one or two pictures, epsically if they are demonstrating something.
Honestly, I really do not want to see that guys face every 3rd or 4th slide. Espically since it is just him talking!
Interesting talk, and interesting post Larry.Anonymous
June 17, 2005
There's a touch of hyperbole there. I had a brand new computer in 1997 that was considered a standard desktop class machine (not loaded out) and it had a P2-233, 64MB of RAM, and a 6GB HD. 10GB was an expensive option. Not great shakes, but you could build a respectable MP3 library. (That was pre-WMA of course)
Your point still stands though. My new PocketPC has almost as much capacity and performance as that system did.Anonymous
June 17, 2005
Chris, I think that there's a version of that that has audio that goes with it - the pictures allow it to make more sense (I think).
I'm not sure what's up with that though.Anonymous
June 17, 2005
The comment has been removedAnonymous
June 17, 2005
Ryan, I think the reason that so many people can "write" software these days is that the hardware is capable of running hugely inefficient code. For example garbage collectors make writing code simple to large number of people who would not be able to handle their own memory management - at the expense of using (wasting) a lot of hardware resources. There will always be applications that require so much processing power or resources that only a small number of people are capable of writing a code to handle it.Anonymous
June 18, 2005
I knew people with massively huge music collections... in 1993.
The wonder of .mod files.Anonymous
June 20, 2005
"Software is a Gas!"
Not being familiar with the oldster lingo, is that a good thing or a bad thing? ;-)Anonymous
June 20, 2005
Oh, he actually meant "a gas," like, not a solid! Sorry, scratch that last comment.
What a gas! (Whatever that means...)Anonymous
June 20, 2005
Dan, don't think old people, think physics.
Nathan's a theoretical physicist, so...Anonymous
July 06, 2005
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