Topic 20 | Debugging |
It is a painful thing To look at your own trouble and know That you yourself and no one else has made it
The word bug has been used to describe an “object of terror'' ever since the fourteenth century. Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Hopper, the inventor of COBOL, is credited with observing the first computer bug—literally, a moth caught in a relay in an early computer system. When asked to explain why the machine wasn't behaving as intended, a technician reported that there was “a bug in the system,” and dutifully taped it—wings and all—into the log book.
Regrettably, we still have bugs in the system, albeit not the flying kind. But the fourteenth century meaning—a bogeyman—is perhaps even more applicable now than ...
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