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>A few years ago I visited a museum in London where they house one of the very first electrical computers ever built. It was this huge contraption with a number of relays that clunked shut or sprang open in order to generate on-off bit arrays. Not only did the programmers of that computer have to debug their code, but they had to actually literally debug the computer itself by scraping off cockroaches that occasionally got squished between the relays and thereby insulating the contact. Hence the term "debugging". Talk about the good old days of computing! In the same vein, I am sure that a hundred years from now programmers will look at what we do/did today and shake their collective head at the primitiveness of it all...




I may be mistaken, but I thought "debugging" was coined by Grace Hopper, the Admiral who developed Cobol.\, where the bug was a moth. They have the diary with the moth taped in it in the Smithsonian.