If startups were making progress this slow on things like self-driving cars, we'd be very underwhelmed. At this rate, we'll all be dead before the majority of cancer treatments are successful.
In other words: different industries. Apples and oranges. Do you really think only programmers have creativity and innovation?
Coming from a computer science background, most people can't imagine the complexity of systems that 4 billion years of evolution has wrought.
Even given intelligent (depending on the code's author) design vs random evolutionary pressure... every living thing on the planet * billions (/Sagan voice) of years is a long time to compete with.