Procedural thinking and bugs

I get the feeling that procedural thinking leads to bugs.

As an example: suppose I have some software that runs on several servers. The flow of data through all the various components is complex. As long as it's all set up right, everything is great, but suppose I want to move one data-processing component from machine X to machine Y. Should I expect some data to get lost or not?

The way programmers usually think about this question is, “Let's see, how does this work...?”

Now, a system designed by a mathematician would have certain properties (such as the one I'm looking for here) by design, orthogonal to all sorts of operations on the system. Because that's how mathematicians think. Cases like the one above, that maybe weren't specifically considered at design time, will nonetheless work as desired. Furthermore, the designer would be able to answer the question immediately. (“Sure, every operation is atomic, and all the state is tracked. It'll work, as long as you don't delete any files from X prematurely.”)

Of course, if moving components had been a use case to start with, a procedural thinker could certainly implement it correctly. But I think there are always unspecified use cases like this.

On the other hand, I find procedural code easier to read and modify than functional code. Perhaps software design should be more abstract, but code should be procedural.