Summary
There are a lot of misconceptions about what Moore's Law actually says and even more confusion over what it implies. We're in the early phases of a major transition...

Sun's Greg Papadopoulos talks about what Moore's Law really means in Don't Become Moore Confused (Or, The Death of the Microprocessor, not Moore's Law). The gist is that the hardware guys have finally run into enough walls with the "bigger, stronger, faster" brute-force approach to improving performance that they are finally switching en masse to various "system on a chip" approaches.

Alas, in his focus on Sun's 'Niagra' SPARC "microsystem" hardware, Greg doesn't even touch the even larger, more complex issue of the walls that the software world has run into in making better software. As yet, there's no clear software solution equivalent to the notion of these hardware "microsystems". There's a lot of exploration of various software facets such as OO, distributed systems, decentralized systems, various takes on functional programming, numerous approaches to concurrency, TDD, DDD, BDD, BVDs (just checking to see if you're awake :-), LOP, dynamic languages, tools, etc. ad nauseum but nothing that's obviously the next step.

So, what do you think is the next level of software development?

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