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Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread September, Part 3 - Less Wrong
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That an incorrect algorithm persisted for decades is rather different from the claim that no correct algorithm was published. This bug only applies to low-level languages that treat computer words as numbers and pray that there is no overflow.
According to one of the comments on the link I posted:
"in section 6.2.1 of his 'Sorting and Searching,' Knuth points out while the first binary search was published in 1946, the first published binary search without bugs did not appear until 1962" (Programming Pearls 2nd edition, "Writing Correct Programs", section 4.1, p. 34).
Besides, it's not like higher-level languages are immune to subtle bugs, though in general they're less susceptible to them.
edit: Also, if you're working on something as crucial as FAI, can you trust the implementation of any existing higher-level language to be completely bug free? It seems to me you'd have to try to write and formally prove your own language, unless you could somehow come up with a sufficiently robust design that even serious bugs in the underlying implementation wouldn't break it.