alt Hacker NewsNo. It is clear that non-coding DNA serves many vital functions, many of which are listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA#Noncoding_genes
We will likely continue to discover ways in which non-coding DNA is used by life, however there is no question that non-coding DNA is far from "useless" and hasn't been for some time.
Within non-coding DNA there do exist some sections with no known biological function which some people call "Junk DNA" however, there is much disagreement about this, and we have only relatively recently begun to directly image structures on the scale of DNA and proteins in situ via cryo-electron-microscopy, allowing us to study the mechanisms and motions of biological machinery frozen in action. DNA and cellular machinery is still far too complex to simulate fully, so CEM is one of the best available tools for studying it. For those reasons, and the fact that the percentage of what folks refer to as "junk dna" has steadily dwindled over the years due to discovery of these functions, it's reasonable to expect we'll discover more.
Agreed. There's something about the gestational phase, aka nanotechnological self-assembly, that surely requires at least a few lines of code(!) and which otherwise is never used again -- until passed on to the next generation. Probably a good bet that the "repetitive elements" are accumulated lines of code for all successive phases of fetal development, from single-celled organism to two, to four, etc until all echoes of evolution are replayed and the present species emerges. "Junk," indeed.