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Can "Page's Law" Be Broken?
theodp writes "Speaking at the Google I/O Developer Conference, Sergey Brin described Google's efforts to defeat "Page's Law," the tendency of software to get twice as slow every 18 months. 'Fortunately, the hardware folks offset that,' Brin joked. 'We would like to break Page's Law and have our software become increasingly fast on the same hardware.' Page, of course, refers to Google co-founder Larry Page, last seen delivering a nice from-the-heart commencement address at Michigan that's worth a watch (or read)."
When companies go into feature race, they forget that it quickly becomes diminishing returns. As the features you enable are less and less likely for your client base to be interested in.
However, if you improve the performance of your core functions (thru UI or speed), your entire customer base gets improvement and have a real reason to upgrade
Well, that depends, OOP alone is certainly not the guilty one for causing all the slowdown, but abstraction in general is guilty for a lot of things. Todays software is just way to removed from the actual hardware to allow certain kinds of optimizations. Random example: When you have a 2D game on older hardware (say GBA or similar) you could scroll by manipulating two bytes that represent the scroll offset, everything else was done in hardware. How do you scroll in a 2D game today? Fullscreen refreshes, as you don't have any access to the hardware to allow faster ways to scroll. So in the worst case you have to manipulate not 2 bytes, but around six million of them. Thats quite a few orders of magnitude difference there, that you can't really optimize away today.
Now for real games of course you might have a GPU that can handle that amount of speed and since modern games are 3D you don't really have a choice of not doing fullscreen refreshes to begin with, but as soon as you look into web games you can see all the problems, games in Flash or Javascript most of the time run completly terrible, worse then games you might have played a decade or two ago, because those games don't even have GPU access but instead pump their data through layers upon layers of abstraction before they finally hit the graphics card.
In the end I think the core problem is simply that todays software is written far to often for an abstract black box, instead of for a actual hardware. Especially web development is just way to removed from the actual machine to even have a chance of running quickly. To make things really fast you would have to optimize all layers of abstractions that the code has to run through, but most often you just don't have the control over it, as development is far more spread out these days. Its no longer your code and the hardware, its your code, dozens or even hundreds of libraries and then maybe far far away some piece of hardware again.