Yes, I should probably clarify and amend my argument.

My impression of the article is that it suggests if ergonomic APIs were more available than they already are, then the frequency with which we see bugs in implementing random variable sampling would decrease. I question that premise because the ergonomic APIs already widely exist -- as the article itself points out, in many language standard libraries, and also in popular third-party libraries. Such a suggestion seems like it relies too much on a single mitigation.

To borrow your examples:

- we don't rely on safety belts alone to reduce injuries: we augment that control with more engineering controls, regulations, and education. - we don't rely on gun safeties alone to reduce injuries: we augment that control with more engineering controls, regulations, and education.

For obvious reasons, I think regulation or mandatory education would be impractical for this situation.

Because other engineering domains, including the ones you mentioned, rely on complementary controls to achieve further safety, I speculated that fuzz testing and deterministic simulation testing could be effective potential complementary controls. Property testing could be another.

I make this argument because I work as a computational statistician with software engineers in a large software company and I see variations on the theme of these bugs on a weekly basis. The usual justification I get is "I know that (insert library implementation) exists but I thought what I wrote was a simpler version of the same thing, and then I have fewer dependencies", as if equivalence of function were self-evident. It's not, and sometimes I can persuade the engineer to use the library from first principles, but generating witnesses violating the properties of the object they're computing tends to be more compelling, and generalizable strategies for testing tend to get more buy-in because the value-add is not limited to statistical applications.