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Knowing a bit about Alan Kay's work I have to say that some posts here are missing the point. In my view when he says that there isn't a Moore's Law for software he is asking why haven't we abstracted software development to the level where we can double our productivity every few years or months.

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Agreed. Been wondering where the fork in the road happened. Was it going OOP instead of FP? Should we be doing domain-driven design & using DSLs everywhere? Should we be using macros to write code that writes code as a routine practice. Was Dylan the way to go instead of Java?

Not sure at all. We are still looking for a silver bullet which may be the wrong path. Pushing the analogy a bit further, if software had behaved like hardware we would have had a constant stream of small improvements over time. If this had happenned C (or Fortran for that matter)would have morphed into a "modern" language (whatever that means).

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