According to Grace Murray Hopper, one of the computer science pioneers, here is the origin of the term debugging. In the early 1950s, the programmers at Harvard University spent weeks in an unsuccessful attempt to find the error in one of their programs. Finally, an investigation of the computer’s insides revealed that an insect had died there, and its remains kept a relay from closing. Once this bug was removed, the program worked perfectly. Since then, the process of removing errors from programs has been known as “debugging”.
But, according to Edsgar Dijkstra, another pioneer in computer science, the term is irresponsible. Debugging suggests that the programmer is not to blame for the error. It’s as if the bug crept into the code while the programmer was looking the other way.
Citated from: http://www2.cs.uidaho.edu/~jeffery/aadebug.html.
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