> I do mostly scientific computing, and the idea that I might have to retract a paper because of a bug in the programming language is intolerable

How do you feel about bugs in the number system because let me tell you IEE-754 doesn't give correct results.

Hate to say this but checking for correctness is your job. There is no programming system that will be 100% correct. Yes, it sucks when a language might break your mental model of how it works (and I'm not speaking for Julia, I don't use it anymore, it's possible the correctness bugs are egregious) but you should be writing extensive tests if you're truly worried about having to retract a paper. If you, say, use python, you better triple check that no dict is getting mutated under the hood when you pass it into a function, etc.