Plugin Bloat (speeding up OpenOffice?)

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Rich Braun wrote:
> Ever since then, it's all been downhill. The fastest computer I ever
> used, in terms of how much it actually got done for me, was a CDC
> Cyber 173 installed in--get this--summer 1978.
> 
> Bloatware seems to be killing everything.

Coincidentally I ran across mention of Wirth's law yesterday after 
reading your message.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

   Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

  or

   Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating.


Here's mention of it in the context of Moore's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

   Another, sometimes misunderstood, point is that exponentially improved
   hardware does not necessarily imply exponentially improved software to
   go with it. The productivity of software developers most assuredly
   does not increase exponentially with the improvement in hardware, but
   by most measures has increased only slowly and fitfully over the
   decades. Software tends to get larger and more complicated over time,
   and Wirth's law even states that "Software gets slower faster than
   hardware gets faster".


More from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

   Programs tend to get bigger and more complicated over time, and
   sometimes programmers even rely on Moore's law to justify writing slow
   code, thinking that it won't be a problem because the hardware will
   get faster anyway.

   As an example of Wirth's law, one can observe that booting a modern PC
   with a modern operating system usually takes longer than it did to
   boot a PC five or ten years ago.

   Software is being used to create software. By using Integrated
   Development Environments, Compilers and Code Libraries, programmers
   are further and further divorced from the machine and closer and
   closer to the software user's needs.

With a possible trend towards "meta" programming, like Intentional 
Programming[1], where the programmer only deals with high-level concepts 
and the tools generate the low-level code, the performance situation 
will likely get worse.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentional_programming


> The open-source movement is pretty much by definition oriented toward
> bloat: contributions keep coming in and adding to the code pile.

Others have already commented on this, but just as with commercial 
software, the degree of bloat is dependent on how well the project is 
managed. Some projects have a very good definition for what is in-scope, 
and reject contributions that don't fit.

One very well known open source project is the Linux kernel. Not exactly 
known for being without bloat, but according what I've read, Linus and 
the others working on it seem to be constantly tossing out obsolete 
portions and kicking stuff out to "user space."

  -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/

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