Leess’s Law and the Gasworks Syndrome
31/12/2019
The Law of Leess is inspired by Moore’s Law; more or less. These two laws have nothing legal or scientific about them, but expressing an opinion in the form of a "law" has a certain flair.
If we consider the evolution of computer performance over time, it’s said to double every 18 months (Moore’s "Law").
But if we consider the evolution of software performance, we observe that it remains stable (at best).
Hence the Law of Leess, which observes that the performance of programmers (now called developers) is halved every 18 months.
Programmers are singled out here, but all underlying layers are involved: operating systems, programming languages, and methods.
The Illusion of Performance Improvement
During a (mandatory) operating system update on a server used in a real-world work context, it became necessary to adapt database access in an "object-oriented" language. These adaptations were prepared on a newer server with objectively better performance. A time gain for testing was naturally expected. Well, no: it’s slower.
Comparing the processing times of the most complex extraction in the application ported between the development server with the "old version" and the newer, more powerful one with the new version, with all other aspects remaining identical, we observe an increase in processing times of over 50%!
The Gasworks Syndrome
What does it consist of?
Let a developer linger on a subject. After solving the fundamentals, instead of consolidating and optimizing their code, they start tackling embellishments (at best superfluous, if not useless or even detrimental). Eventually, their work becomes impossible to maintain, even by the original author. Then, whoever takes over throws it all out and starts over (the full cycle: a simple and effective initial solution, then embellishments, and so on).
There’s an additional refinement in command-line options and, even better, in configuration files. Oh, those configuration files, a delight!
Examples abound. One of the first to be attributed the gasworks syndrome is sendmail. The person who worked on it managed to create a programming language expressed in configuration files!
And with the installation of a new server using the latest operating system, a trend is confirmed: protecting your server from hackers is increasingly fascinating.
- basic processes change and, above all, become increasingly verbose in system logs,
- it almost becomes an AI task to identify relevant security information, as it’s drowned in a flood of useless data,
- the default configuration of protection systems is more permissive,
- the organization and syntax of their configuration files are more complex and incompatible with previous versions.
The highlight is seeing that regexes are even more unreadable than before; one wouldn’t have thought it possible!
Oh yes, a juicy detail: real documentation is nowhere to be found...
And to think that not only do all these young folks reinventing the wheel create work for all administrators, but they do it for free!