In December 2023, security agencies from five countries in North America, Europe, and the south Pacific produced a document encouraging senior executives in all software producing organizations to take responsibility for and oversight of the security of the software their organizations produce. The following February, 2024, The White House published a cybersecurity outline bringing the December document to the forefront. In this work we review the safe languages listed in these documents, and compare the safety of those languages with Erlang and Elixir, two BEAM languages.

These security agencies’ declaration of some languages as safe is necessary but insufficient to make wise decisions regarding what language to use when creating code. We propose a new way of looking at languages and the ease with which unsafe code can be written and used. We call this new perspective unsafe impedance. We then go on to examine nine languages considered to be safe with regard to this unsafe impedance and suggest a business process that aids organizations in their production of safe by design software.