> In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. This may well have been a typesetting error and not an error in the program that Lovelace devised. All the same, this must be the oldest bug in computing. I marveled that, for ten minutes or so, unknowingly, I had wrestled with this first ever bug.
The real mark of a non-trivial program is that it doesn't work on the first try.
It's incredible how Babbage, frustrated that the mass production precision machining technology necessary to make his simple engine work didn't exist yet, decides that the best way forward is to design a new system an order of magnitude more complex and then go to Italy to find more advanced manufacturing somehow.
The real mark of a non-trivial program is that it doesn't work on the first try.
It's incredible how Babbage, frustrated that the mass production precision machining technology necessary to make his simple engine work didn't exist yet, decides that the best way forward is to design a new system an order of magnitude more complex and then go to Italy to find more advanced manufacturing somehow.