When did software go off the rails?
This article is based on the misunderstanding that software complexity has NOT grown exponentially. It has.<p>Even though features might be added in a linear fashion (and I think that&#x27;s not true either - the teams that build large applications have grown too), the complexity the whole system might scale as the square of the number of features, or exponentially. That is: if word2017 has 10 times the number of features as Word6.0, we should not be surprised to see CPU and RAM requirements be 100 or 1000 times higher.<p>Finally, just like a memory manager in an OS makes sure all memory is actually <i>used</i>, software should be using the computers&#x27; resources. If an average computer now is 4x3Ghz then a foreground application such as a photo editor should have features that at least some times puts that hardware to good use. Otherwise there was no point in having that hardware to begin with. As software developers we should aim to scale our software to use the available hardware. We should not just let twice as fast hardware run our software twice as fast.