I think Alan Kay is best interpreted as saying "there has not been a Moore's law level of progress for software", not "there can be no Moore's Law for software"

I think Alan Kay is best interpreted as saying "there has not been a Moore's law level of progress for software", not "there can be no Moore's Law for software". I can think of two metrics by which software progress can be measured. Measure 1: Consider a software to be a sequence of operations which generates some arbitrary particular string of bits. A measure of progress can be, for any random string of bits whose generation we view as useful, how far is the totality of code (libraries, OS portions, etc) from the true Kolmogorov Complexity? Then Moore's Law can be, is this difference between true and actual complexity decreasing exponentially? Put another way, is the level to which we can compress the code specification of software exponentially approaching it's limit? I don't think so. But I also don't think this measure is useful as its too abstract. Measure 2: For any given piece of software from the past, is the total number of man years required to replicate it decreasing exponentially as a function of time? Again I don't think so, not uniformly. I think it's more polynomial. Of course there is a theoretical manner by which Exponential progress can be made in software. But some people view it as a dangerous existential threat. Either way, achieving Moore's law for software is not something that should be stepped into blindly.