Comment by pmarreck

I've never heard of a functional language that would allow you to initialize a value to whatever value the system memory already had in that memory location. In languages that allow nil, it would at least be nil; in languages that don't, you would have gotten an error about an uninitialized and undefaulted value. In any typed language, you would have also gotten an error.

It's true that C may be unique-ish in this regard though- this bug also couldn't happen in Ruby, which is not a functional language, but Ruby certainly still makes undefined behaviors much more possible than in other languages like Elixir.