Bloat is still software's biggest vulnerability (2024)

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away 1 January 2024. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software,” published in Computer, the magazine for members of the IEEE Computer Society, which I read early in my career as an entrepreneur and software developer. In what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. A version of this post was originally published on my personal blog, Berthub.eu. Some years ago I did a talk at a local university on cybersecurity, titled “Cyber and Information Security: Have We All Gone Mad?” It is still worth reading today since we have gone quite mad collectively. The way we build and ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to apps using millions of lines of code to open a garage door, and other simple programs importing 1,600 external code libraries—dependencies—of unknown provenance. Software security is dire, ... Read full article.