What I took from this post, is that we should keep working on compilers. They could provably optimize away most of the performance issues and move us closer to doing category theory instead of dealing with the metal.
(I'm not trying to be snarky here, but I've studied category theory and it seems like a whole lot of effort for very little benefit. On the other hand, it's fun to figure out the metal. (Although silicon's not exactly a metal...))
Heh heh. Having worked mostly with math professors, I would say the code they write almost exclusively belongs to the car-mechanic school. Math professors never deck up their code with CT. The majority of the time a math prof has to write code, its to do heavy-duty applied math, engg stuff ( solve pde's, fluid mechanics, EE math, fourier transforms, gradients etc. ) or to display some cool visualization to the students ( here's how a vector space looks! here is what happens when you apply linear transformation!! here are all the elements of a quotient group!!! ) - those tend to be done in Matlab/Mathematica/Maple/Gap...and these tools have zero CT. The applied stuff tends to use netlib, gams, gsl, colt, apache math...mostly a lot of gsl these days...again no CT there. Most of them are very happy to declare giant matrices & happily mutate away.
I'm sure you get it, but just for the record, by math-professor I meant "very focused on things that to most people seem incredibly abstract", with a side of "passionate about solving intellectual challenges for their own sake".
OOP is leaky, maybe we should ditch it. The ADT and typeclasses in Haskell are much more general and well-behaved than objects in my experience.