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.
It is exceptionally painful to read Niklaus Wirth’s article A Plea for Lean Software from 1995, which laments that 1995 era software needed whole megabytes, and then goes on to describe the Oberon Operating System which he built which needed only 200KB, including an editor and a compiler. There are now likely projects that have more than 200KB of YAML alone.
$ find translations/ config/ -iname '*.yaml' | xargs cat | wc -c 572429 $That’s only the project itself; including dependencies it’s more.