Learn English – Is the use of the term “bugged” to refer to software bugs in English a worldwide or regional use

programmingword-usage

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:

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:

There can be no doubt but that many new and simple noise silencers will appear, both of the amplitude limiting and the "silence punch" types. Several are known to be in the laboratory and they should be "de-bugged" before long.

From 1951, The Flying Lady

An ignition system, no matter how ornery, is still logical, and can be de-bugged using step-by-step analysis

From 1959, Automatic Control:

two members of the class trying to repair one of the twelve Dynalog recorders which were purposely “bugged” by the instructor

From 1960, from an article about the "IBM Development Laboaratory in Endicott, New York" in Missile Design & Development volume 6:

At the conclusion of this study, 2500 randomly inserted bugged components had been investigated. An automatic detection capability of 99.1 percent was attained for a group of 300 consecutive tests. An average of two package replacements were required in this study to correct any of the bugs introduced into the machine.

From 1960, Radio-electronics, Volume 31 :

It is very likely that the tubes that give unsatisfactory oscillation are being “bugged” by parasitic oscillation.

Then the word "bugged", already in use, entered use in software:

From 1962, Fundamentals of electronic data processing: An Introduction to Computer Programming

We are going to assume that this programmer knows no more about his job than you would, at this stage. In fact, we are going to assume that you are this programmer. A "premature" programmer.You will produce a program bugged with wrong assumptions and errors, so that it will take several tries before you develop one that is workable.

From 1964, by Micheal J. Synge of Boeing, A Case of Too Much Precision, Communications of the ACM: Volume 7, page 723 :

...I have transliterated it into FORTRAN II for the IBM 7094. In doing this I stumbled across solutions to a decimal-to-binary conversion problem that has long bugged FORTRAN.

From 1965, Data Processing Digest, Volume 11:

An interesting feature is a bugged code and the history of what happens to it through the successive compilations

From 1965, Alchemy and artificial intelligence by Hubert Lederer Dreyfus

Newell, Shaw, and Simon's claims concerning their still bugged program had launched the chess machine into the realm of scientific mythology.

(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:

Many involved and carefully written programs have been "bugged" because their authors did not know this principle.

From 1971, Symposium on Engineering Computer Software: verification, qualification, certification

The model involved over 3,000 unknowns and required approximately 3/4 hour to obtain the "bugged" radial displacement solution

From 1972, Data Processing Digest, Volume 18 :

Bugged programs are the usual reason for schedule slippage, unusable outputs, or— sequentially— both

From 1972, What computers can't do: a critique of artificial reason

Public gullibility and Simon's enthusiasm was such that Newell, Shaw, and Simon's claims concerning their still bugged program

From 1973, Computing with mini computers ,

Figure 8.6 A bugged code.

...

[index entry] Bugged code, 88

From 1975, Data Management, Volume 13 :

dually coded modules have been used for instant "repair" of programs, which in fact took two weeks to repair (the bugged module).

From 1980, InfoWorld:

The emulator is virtually crash-proof since the bugged program never actually executes. Instead, every instruction, errant or not, is simulated.

From 1981, Human factors in software development (3 distinct instances):

the bugged program that they are studying
...
The reader can readily reconstruct each bugged listing by referring to Table 1 in conjunction with the "un-bugged" version of each program
...
the bugged line (line 7400)

From 1982, The Visible Computer: 6502 (Apple II version)

Almost never press reset. Use it only as a last resort in situations such as when you have crashed the system by GOing a bugged subroutine

From 1983, Computer Education

total there were 24 bugged programs prepared

From 1983, The American Mathematical Monthly

But this bug, once discovered, is easy to fix: simply eliminate 3 from the product in the bugged definition.

The 1984 Apple IIe Programming: A Step-by-step Guide, Book 1 has a section titled:

BUGGED PROGRAMS

From 1984, Research in British Universities, Polytechnics and Colleges, Volume 1

An intelligent program checker: PROLOG program incorporating knowledge of novices to comment on their bugged PASCAL programs

From 1984, The Visible Computer: 6502, Machine Language Teaching System,
Commodore 64 Version

running a program, no matter how bugged, can't physically damage your computer. The only thing a bugged program can hurt is your ego.

...

Suffice it to say, bugged machine language programs are not especially forgiving.

...

That's why faulty Basic programs are much less likely to crash the computer than bugged machine language programs.

1986 Writer's Market: Where to Sell What to Write:

Becauase space is limited we look for short articles. Try to avoid sending bugged programs and incomplete submissions — no cassette of program listing

From 1986, Assessing Learning with LOGO

Make up a program that contains bugs. The program can have any commands you want, but it should make a design or pattern of some sort when it is fixed. Write both the correct commands and bugged commands below.

From 1986, Empirical Studies of Programmers: First Workshop, Volume 1, Part 3

Table 1: The Output of the Bugged Functions

From 1986, Human Resources and Computing

The 'bugged' program was then passed to another student
...
The bugged version was as follows

From 1987, The Art of C Programming:

Here's a (bugged) program to evaluate

From 1987, The debugger's handbook, TURBO Pascal:

To help you appreciate the process of debugging, study the following example of a bugged program.

From 1989, The Art of Lisp Programming:

Just occasionally, debugging becomes the art of throwing away a bugged function and replacing it with one that was already there!

From 1991, Advanced Research on Computers in Education

The 'instantiation to an unexpected value' bug, for instance, implies that a goal containing variables succeeds in both the ideal and bugged code. Thus only bugs capable of yielding this result need to be considered....For reasons of tractability and clarity, we also stipulate that the bugged code may only have one difference from the ideal code, that of the bug chosen. ... If the 'problem' clause has a lower number than the 'ideal' clause the traces will show a failed resolution for the 'ideal' code where the 'bugged' code has a successful one.

From 1991, The design, implementation, and use of DSTutor: a tutoring system for denotational semantics:

execution of programs with a bugged semantic equation where the goal is the detection and specification of the bugged semantic equation based on input/output behavior

From 1993, Visual Basic for Dos: Developers Guide :

Errors are trappable, and the Visual Basic interpreter can stop execution to tell you that something's wrong. A bug, according to the definition subscribed to by professional programmers, is far more serious. The bugged program can go about

From 1994, Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Environments and Tools for Parallel Scientific Computing

The execution of this bugged version starts with an initial state where N=4, and terminates with a segmentation fault.

From 1995, The Mathematica Journal:

This article discusses the advantages of a general method, called distribution-free testing, and demonstrates it at work correcting a very badly bugged multiplication function...Coping with such a bad function should therefore be an interesting challenge for distribution-free testing. When we use distribution-free testing with this bugged multiplication function, we will get a startling improvement - the correct results.

From 1995, Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Object-Orientation in Operating Systems

Debugging: A problem with persistence is that if a bugged program is run, it can often destroy parts of the store it needs, or at least modify parts of the store and cause each run to have a different behaviour.

From 1998, Tenth Conference on Software Engineering Education & Training :

The mail headers provided timing information together with the subject's identity, and the sequence of mail messages from each subject provided the sequence of changes that they made to their 'bugged' program in trying to fix the errors.

From 1999, "Debug It: A debugging practicing system" in Computers & Education vol. 32:

Furthermore, all programs should be short in nature so as to encourage the students to comprehend the logic of the given bugged program rather than guessing for the correct solution.

From 2000, DHTML and JavaScript

After I've explained how this Property works currently, which is the bugged version, I'm going to put a section in that explains how it is supposed to work, just in case they decide to fix the problems.

From 2002, Estimating Residual Faults from Code Coverage

To establish the mean growth in detected faults, we measured the failure rate of each fault inserted individually into PREPRO, using a test harness where the outputs of the bugged version were compared against the final version

From 2003, LINUX and UNIX Programming Tools: A Primer for Software Developers

In the following session, we run the bugged program in background. The PID of the process is 3574.

From 2003, Professional PHP4

[index entry] bugged version, output, 168

From 2005, Unix: The Textbook :

The end of bugged code !

From 2005, Software That Sells: A Practical Guide to Developing and Marketing

The Windows versions of WordPerfect came out 16 months after its Microsoft competitor and was badly bugged.

From 2006, Pro Perl :

If we chose to return a result rather than modifying the passed argument, then the code would be perfectly valid but badly bugged.

From 2009, Introduction to Embedded Systems: Interfacing to the Freescale 9S12 :

Often it is easier to visualize bugs by looking at the assembly listing in and around the bugged code.

From 2009, CUDA Solutions for the SSSP Problem :

4.3 A Bugged Implementation

From 2009, Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society

Dungeon Lords was not a success and is known for its complex interface, poor performance, and bugged game play.

From 2010, Automated Reasoning: 5th International Joint Conference

All systems—except 'GermanBug' (a bugged version of 'German07')—are certified to be safe by mcmt while for 'GermanBug,' the tool returns an error trace consisting of 16 transitions.

From 2011, EMBOSS Developer's Guide: Bioinformatics Programming

A debugger executes the bugged program and traces its internal state to allow problems with the code to be rapidly identified and fixed.

From 2012, Solving PDEs in C++: Numerical Methods in a Unified Object-Oriented Approach :

The bugged instruction in this segment usually calls another function; the block of this function is then debugged

From 2013, Local Networks and the Internet: From Protocols to Interconnection

These numbers were due to a bugged implementation.

From 2013, Software Design for Real-time Systems:

Fig.11.7 Debriefing a bugged program

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".

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