does moore's law apply to softwares too, because...

[fuzzy wozzy]

I've been noticing something of a trend because it took me 4 months of daily effort to make a basic division program, (long) program,
then suddenly one idea led to another and within a period weeks I found other similar division methods such as (div) and (re) for
long divisions...

at the time I thought nothing of it, it could happen, right, and then with the (unspell) and (unspellx) programs, they weren't as simple
as I had thought it was going to be, but still, (unspell) took about 9 hours and (unspellx) took maybe a couple of hours with another
hour of so of debugging time, by the way edsger dijkstra said good programmers never have to debug because the first time they
write their program is the last time they have to write it (first time is all one needs to make a program that works correctly),

well, that's like a story about edison vs. tesla, while edison emphasized 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, took something like
over 10000 tries to invent a lightbulb, tesla was known to never write anything down on paper, no schematics or diagrams or algorithms
of any kind, everything was thought through in his mind and when he tested out the idea the first time was enough to create his
perfection seemingly out of thin air, but I digress...

of course one could say that division program was more complicated but on hindsight it was very simple, in other words, it took a
very simple solution to make it work, so you could say both division programs and (unspell) programs were equally complicated for me,
which is another way of saying that they were both equally simple...

which brings me to my original question, could there be something like a moore's law at work as applied to software development too?
that is to say, the more you get used to solving a problem, the easier it gets to solve other kinds of probelms as well?

[Mark Tarver]

This is a question of general intelligence - which I personally view as the rate at which you learn something.   Smarter people get to a higher level in relation to the effort expended.  But yes, there is a definite advantage in having a clear mental model, which only comes from practice often.  Hence some programmers - me included - enjoy rewriting programs purely for aesthetics and it is easier.  

Mark