I'm sure it is but it also has negligible application to quotidian grunt-programming which is regrettably what 99.9% of people on HN do. Learning a skill that seems never to get used seems completely pointless to me. That's a critique of industry, not of linear algebra by the way.
I agree that abstract algebra has only marginal important to the general practice of programming. I only dispute that it's marginal for cryptography engineering.
