I've been hearing this for 25 years, since I was just starting college.
We are marginally closer to it now technologically, and probably actually significantly (as in, "more than marginally") farther away from it overall, because the explosion in programming use cases has greatly exceeded our improvement in the ability to automate.
Even the given example is beyond our reach right now! We already can't automate that simple specification of a sorting algorithm into an efficient one. How are we supposed to automate the creation of a graphics card driver with AI? We'd have much better leverage just applying better software engineering to that task, and I say that without particularly criticizing the people doing that work or anything... I just guarantee that they are not so well greased up with engineering that there's no improvement they can make bigger than "let's try to throw AI at it".
There are still places where category theory is a good idea. A lot of our distributed systems would be better off if someone was thinking in terms of CRDTs or lattices or something. But we're farther than ever from automating our computing tasks.
We are marginally closer to it now technologically, and probably actually significantly (as in, "more than marginally") farther away from it overall, because the explosion in programming use cases has greatly exceeded our improvement in the ability to automate.
Even the given example is beyond our reach right now! We already can't automate that simple specification of a sorting algorithm into an efficient one. How are we supposed to automate the creation of a graphics card driver with AI? We'd have much better leverage just applying better software engineering to that task, and I say that without particularly criticizing the people doing that work or anything... I just guarantee that they are not so well greased up with engineering that there's no improvement they can make bigger than "let's try to throw AI at it".
There are still places where category theory is a good idea. A lot of our distributed systems would be better off if someone was thinking in terms of CRDTs or lattices or something. But we're farther than ever from automating our computing tasks.