> A higher level language could have relieved the programmers from low-level details, thus giving them more cognitive space for avoiding logical bugs in other sections of their code.
This can also be said of choosing simpler design, organizing the code in a better manner, or could have been avoided through more comprehensive testing -- all of which were pointed out by the official report.
Having the bug end up in production could have been avoided simply through adequate testing and verification. I fail to see how a higher-level language helps with that.
The fact that the programmers might have had less stuff to worry about and, therefore, saved their concentration for more critical parts of the code, is hardly direct evidence that the bug could not have been introduced. It can equally well be argued that a higher-level language would have attracted programmers with less experience in mission-critical code, who would have failed to grasp even the possibility of bugs more subtle than this one.
This can also be said of choosing simpler design, organizing the code in a better manner, or could have been avoided through more comprehensive testing -- all of which were pointed out by the official report.