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Human error is what makes programming difficult. You can watch a computer do billions of calculations flawlessly, while a human cannot type a few hundred words on average before they make an error of some kind. Developing software is not amenable to simple checklists, and is a very creative process. What would be more helpful than checklists are improved languages that make it much harder to make a simple mistake.

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I could see developing a checklist of things to look for during code review. It might be fairly tedious since you’d probably need to scrutinize each line.

Code review guidelines or style guides come close to being checklists. There are also various kinds of static analysis like CheckStyle, FindBugs, etc. that check for common mistakes.

Of course, statically typed languages have type checking built in that prevents mistakes. Plenty of languages already have type systems and/or object constructs prevent the class of problems that led to Heartbleed (bounds checked arrays IIRC).

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