I don't see how it addresses the original complaint. Vishnevsky basically stated that if you are trying to run a scientific experiment on a supercomputer, maybe it's a risky idea to use a new programming language with a new stdlib and a bunch of OSS libraries vs using an old language like C with very stable set of existing code because new things tend to have unknown bugs? Vishnevsky has a point, but unless you are running some critical computations on supercomputers, maybe it doesn't apply to you?

To be clear, in supercomputing environments people still use old versions of CentOS just to make sure that library version updates do not change their computation results. I don't think many people here would say "I am sticking to Ubuntu 16.04 because I am afraid that the updates to some library like gmplib will slightly change my computation results in a way that is hard for me to detect".

Also, just staying with the old doesn't mean it's correct. You can also introduce bugs to your libs. I think NASA thought this through long time ago and solved it by making sure critical parts of the code are implemented twice using different stacks with different programmers.

If you are NASA, CERN, LLNL, or a bank, maybe it's a good idea to implement your computations once in Python and once in Julia (by at least two different programmers) and compare the outputs. And I don't think in this situation Julia is any different from other languages (other than you may put too much trust into it and skip this dual implementation). Case in point: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aclos...