In Memoriam Wirth: A Plea for Lean Software in the Age of Bloatware

This post commemorates computing pioneer Niklaus Wirth and echoes his 1995 call for 'lean software.' Today, software has ballooned to millions of lines of code, relying on thousands of external libraries, resulting in rampant security vulnerabilities. The author argues this isn't accidental but a consequence of economic incentives, citing the Apple iMessage vulnerability as an example of the security risks of excessive complexity. The EU is introducing regulations to address this, and the author's Trifecta project, a functional image-sharing application written in just 1600 lines of code, demonstrates the feasibility of lean software, reflecting on the over-reliance and security risks in modern software development.