A Moore's Law for Programming Languages?

We're familiar with "Moore's Law", the rate of advance in hardware that allows simultaneous increases in performance and reductions on cost. (Or, more specifically, the reduction in size of a transistor by one half every eighteen months.)

Is there a similar effect for programming languages? Are programming languages getting better (more powerful and cheaper to run) and if so at what rate?

It's a tricky question, since programming languages rest on top of hardware, and as the performance of hardware improves, the performance of programming languages gets a free ride. But we can filter out the effect of faster hardware and look at language design.

Even so, rating the power of a programming language is difficult. What is the value of the concept of an array? The concept of structured (GOTO-less) programming? Object-oriented programming?

The advancements made by languages can be deceptive. The LISP language,  considered the most advanced language by luminaries of the field, was created in the late 1950s! LISP has features that modern languages such as Ruby and C# are just beginning to incorporate. If RUby and C# are modern, what is LISP?

The major languages (assembly, FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, Pascal, C, C++, and Perl, in my arbitrary collection), have a flat improvement curve. Improvements are linear and not exponential (or even geometric). There is no Moore's Law scaling of improvements.

If not programming languages, perhaps IDEs. Yet here also, progress has been less than exponential. From the initial IDE of TurboPascal (compiler and editor combined) through Microsoft's acquisition and integration of Nu-Mega's CodeView debugger, to Microsoft's SQL Intellisense and stored procedure debugger, improvements have -- in my opinion -- been linear and not worthy of the designation of "Moore's Law".

IDEs are not a consistent measure, since languages like Perl and Ruby have bucked the trend by avoiding (for the most part) IDEs entirely and using nothing more than "print" statements for debugging.

If hardware advances at an exponential rate and programming languages advance at a linear rate, then we have quite a difference in progress.

A side effect of this progress will be the price paid for good programming talent. It's easy to make a smaller and cheaper computer, but not as easy to make a smaller and cheaper application.