The field of software is maturing as we’re reaching the end of Moore’s Law and time passes. Times of constant innovation is very slowly coming to an end, the curve is slowly flattening. You can already see it with general trends like type-safety, DX features universal in all languages (linting etc.), browsers finally becoming the universal OS (Wasm, WebUSB, GPU), more and more things being standardized every day.
Proebsting's Law says compilers double code efficiency every 18 years. I wonder what the doubling interval is for algorithmic performance. I expect it would be tough to calculate, like the cost of living, because algorithmic improvements rarel affect all aspects of code performance equally. Incremental improvements in sorting efficiency likely have one of the broadest reaches, followed by concurrency improvements and object lifetime analysis. Then there's a long tail of niche applications that only apply to certain domains. Only the Amdahl's Law parts of the code has a substantial impact on performance.
