[bobbylarrybobby]

One can hardly call using the canonical autograd library and getting incorrect gradients or using arrays whose indices aren't 1:len and getting OOB errors “shooting oneself in the foot” — these things are supposed to Just Work, but they don't. Interfaces would go a long way towards codifying interoperability expectations (although wouldn't help with plain old correctness bugs).

With regard to power and flexibility, homoiconicity and getting to hook into compiler passes does make Julia powerful and flexible in a way that most other languages aren't. But I'm not sure if that power is what results in bugs — more likely it's the function overloading/genericness, whose power and flexibility I think is a bit overstated.

[patagurbon]

Zygote hasn’t been the “canonical” autodiff library for some time now, the community recognized its problems long ago. Enzyme and Mooncake are the major efforts and both have a serious focus on correctness

[hatmatrix]

In this debate there seems to be a pervasive impulse to point out "that specific problem doesn't exist anymore," and to their credit the developers are generally good at responding to serious problems.

However, the spirit of the original post was about the lack of safeguards and cohesive direction by the community to find ways to preempt such errors. It's not an easy problem to solve since Julia's composability and flexibility adds complexity not encountered in other languages. The current solution is, 'users beware', while there are a few people working on ways to enforce correct composability. I think it's best to acknowledge that this is an ongoing issue and that it's not a problem anymore because the specific ones pointed out are fixed.