Right. But until we have a comparable body of production software written in pure functional code -- and by comparable, I mean closer to the volume of code written in today's mainstream languages and by average developers, not a few applications written by elite developers -- we can't say for sure whether the pure functional approach does in fact prevent buggy software, or whether it simply leads to different kinds of bugs.

A lot of advocacy for functional programming and languages like Haskell makes claims about being safer because certain types of programmer error are prevented. However, relatively little commentary also highlights downsides like the need for accumulating parameters and strictness annotations just to achieve acceptable performance, or the maintenance hazards of having both monadic and non-monadic implementations of algorithms. Until someone finds a way to prove that a large-scale lazy functional program can't exceed the available system resources with an explosion of thunks, any claim that this approach is inherently safe seems rather premature.

So not sure where you are getting at.

In the vast majority of cases, it's about delivering customer value--whether through good, buggy, or nonexistent software.

A buggy language used to make buggy software beats a perfect solution every time if it gets you paid.

EDIT:

Downvote all you'd like; in the vast majority of cases the pain point of a customer getting solved is what matters, not how we solve it.

And of course this is a false dichotomy anyway.

And again, the question there is "Did Heartbleed keep people from getting value out of OpenSSL?". The answer is no, even if the value provided wasn't as advertised. It was more useful to have something--anything!--than nothing.

Arguably, though the limited sandboxes in wide deployment are sufficiently full of holes that most code provides some access to something that might be considered critical infrastructure.

'And again, the question there is "Did Heartbleed keep people from getting value out of OpenSSL?". The answer is no, even if the value provided wasn't as advertised. It was more useful to have something--anything!--than nothing.'

Possibly. Belief that you're secure when you aren't can quite definitely be much worse than no belief that you're secure, but I'm significantly less sure that Heartbleed moved many people from "sufficiently secure" to "insufficiently secure" in many individual cases (the possibility exists, I just lack the data to make any determination).

Also, for many use cases, there exist (and existed then, of course) alternatives that are probably more secure. If "nothing" meant using those instead it was quite a bit better to have "nothing".