Why Bloat Is Still Software's Biggest Vulnerability (2024)

Summary

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, which is a function both of the quality of the code and the sheer amount of it. Many of us programmers know the current situation is untenable. Many programmers (and their management) sadly haven’t ever experienced anything else. And for the rest of us, we rarely get the time to do a better job.It is not just you; we are not merely suffering from nostalgia: Software really is very weird today. Let me briefly go over the terrible state of software security, and then spend some time on why it is so bad. I also mention some regulatory and legislative things going on that we might use to make software quality a priority again. Finally, I talk about an actual useful piece of software I wrote as a proof of concept that one can still make minimal and simple yet modern software.I hope that this post provides some mental and moral support for suffering programmers and technologists who want to improve things. It is not just you; We are not merely suffering from nostalgia: Software really is very wei...