Similar things were said in the 1950s and 1960s. I don't remember specifics but our lecturers told us that computer scientists back then thought that they could actually just mathematically express a program and there would be no need for a programmer.
The Vienna Development Method has been around for god knows how many years and have never caught on.
Saying that programming is like maths, is the same as saying cooking is like chemistry. Sure there is lots of chemistry going on in the food, but I doubt many chefs know or care about the chemical properties of organic compounds.
Additionally we actually did a course on VDM back in 2006/2007 and the lecturer said that he had only encountered one team that proved their program to be correct and it took them about a decade.
You could argue the code itself is the mathematical expression. But honestly as someone that has a very strong Maths background and moved to Software Engineering most software unless you are doing something very specific like a sorting algorithm a lot of code isn't really that algorithmic, you are in the vast majority of cases just expressing a set of business rules and that is in my experience is best described by Use Cases / User Stories.
For most businesses this is simply a waste of time. Getting developers to write tests is hard enough and businesses don't see the benefit until things start going horrifically wrong.