In the 1950's, the primary uses of the word "bugged" was to describe a room that contained a hidden microphone, or to refer to a telephone line that was being tapped.
Over the last few years, I've seen more and more people use the word "bugged" to refer to a software bug.
For example, someone recently wrote, "That function returns the wrong value, it is bugged."
In contrast, I am used to people writing, "That function returns the wrong value, it has a bug."
Is the use of the word "bugged" to refer to software bugs now universally understood in the English language, or is it predominately used in specific regions?
As a bonus, does anyone know where this particular use of the word "bugged" (as opposed to "bug" or "buggy") originated, and when. Also, was the origin fostered by a specific cultural group?
UPDATE:
The number of programmers with decades of experience stating they have never encountered anyone using "bugged" in this context is notable. I postulate that this effect is a consequence of people largely being exposed to highly monolithic environments. For the non-programmers who state they have never heard people using "bugged" in this way, that is possibly just a reflection of their limited exposure to technical content, as every time I have seen it used has been in a technical context.
For any doubters, programmers or otherwise, here are just a few concrete examples from the real world:
- From mozilla.org: 1,2,3,4,5,6
- From github.com: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17
- From codeplex.com: 1,2,3,4,5
- From stackoverflow.com (on StackExchange): 1,2,3
For those interested, general web searches provide thousands of additional examples. Searches directly on technical websites provides many more examples.
(Note that the above are random examples pulled from a web searches. I apologize in advance if there is any inappropriate content. Many thanks to NVZ for making the list of examples easier to read.)
Best Answer
Before there were software bugs and software programs that needed to be de-bugged, the term existed and applied to defects or flaws in circuits, machines or operations.
From the Index to Radio for the Year 1937:
From 1951, The Flying Lady
From 1959, Automatic Control:
From 1960, from an article about the "IBM Development Laboaratory in Endicott, New York" in Missile Design & Development volume 6:
From 1960, Radio-electronics, Volume 31 :
Then the word "bugged", already in use, entered use in software:
From 1962, Fundamentals of electronic data processing: An Introduction to Computer Programming
From 1964, by Micheal J. Synge of Boeing, A Case of Too Much Precision, Communications of the ACM: Volume 7, page 723 :
From 1965, Data Processing Digest, Volume 11:
From 1965, Alchemy and artificial intelligence by Hubert Lederer Dreyfus
(The above passage is quoted or repeated in many other works and seems to be the most famous use of "bugged" to characterize flawed computer software).
From 1970, Ten statement Fortran plus Fortran IV for the IBM 360, featuring the WATFOR and WATFIV compilers:
From 1971, Symposium on Engineering Computer Software: verification, qualification, certification
From 1972, Data Processing Digest, Volume 18 :
From 1972, What computers can't do: a critique of artificial reason
From 1973, Computing with mini computers ,
...
From 1975, Data Management, Volume 13 :
From 1980, InfoWorld:
From 1981, Human factors in software development (3 distinct instances):
From 1982, The Visible Computer: 6502 (Apple II version)
From 1983, Computer Education
From 1983, The American Mathematical Monthly
The 1984 Apple IIe Programming: A Step-by-step Guide, Book 1 has a section titled:
From 1984, Research in British Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges, Volume 1
From 1984, The Visible Computer: 6502, Machine Language Teaching System,
Commodore 64 Version
...
...
1986 Writer's Market: Where to Sell What to Write:
From 1986, Assessing Learning with LOGO
From 1986, Empirical Studies of Programmers: First Workshop, Volume 1, Part 3
From 1986, Human Resources and Computing
From 1987, The Art of C Programming:
From 1987, The debugger's handbook, TURBO Pascal:
From 1989, The Art of Lisp Programming:
From 1991, Advanced Research on Computers in Education
From 1991, The design, implementation, and use of DSTutor: a tutoring system for denotational semantics:
From 1993, Visual Basic for Dos: Developers Guide :
From 1994, Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Environments and Tools for Parallel Scientific Computing
From 1995, The Mathematica Journal:
From 1995, Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Object-Orientation in Operating Systems
From 1998, Tenth Conference on Software Engineering Education & Training :
From 1999, "Debug It: A debugging practicing system" in Computers & Education vol. 32:
From 2000, DHTML and JavaScript
From 2002, Estimating Residual Faults from Code Coverage
From 2003, LINUX and UNIX Programming Tools: A Primer for Software Developers
From 2003, Professional PHP4
From 2005, Unix: The Textbook :
From 2005, Software That Sells: A Practical Guide to Developing and Marketing
From 2006, Pro Perl :
From 2009, Introduction to Embedded Systems: Interfacing to the Freescale 9S12 :
From 2009, CUDA Solutions for the SSSP Problem :
From 2009, Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society
From 2010, Automated Reasoning: 5th International Joint Conference
From 2011, EMBOSS Developer's Guide: Bioinformatics Programming
From 2012, Solving PDEs in C++: Numerical Methods in a Unified Object-Oriented Approach :
From 2013, Local Networks and the Internet: From Protocols to Interconnection
From 2013, Software Design for Real-time Systems:
So "de-bugged" and to a lesser extent "bugged" have been used as long as there have been software bugs.
So the answer to when is between 1959 and 1965.
As to, where, well Professor Dreyfus was at MIT when he wrote Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence in 1965, which includes "bugged program".