Surely you want to know what is a bug in programming because you are immersed in this world of computer programs and you want to protect them from any error in the codes of the different types of programming languages and risk with your data and devices.
At some point everyone has heard the term “bug” when referring to a software error, a bug in the computer program or system that triggers an undesired result.
That is why, in this new article we will tell you in depth what a bug in programming is, how they are created and how to avoid them. So do not change the tab on your computer and pay close attention.
here we go!
what is a programming bug?
A programming bug refers to computer errors and failures in a program or computer system. These alterations produce unexpected results, that is to say, they make the program work in a different way than it was designed for.
The word ” bug”, which means “insect” and which is increasingly known among those who manage and maintain computer programs or mobile applications, shows that there is some risk with data and devices.
And although it is a very recurrent term in this digital era, it is a concept that began to be used more than 140 years ago. It is said that it was the American inventor and founder of General Electric, Thomas Alva Edison, who described in his notes as “bugs “ the different technical problems he encountered when developing a project.
This term was also associated with the physicist and mathematician Grace Murray Hopper and others working at Harvard University on the Mark II. They reported that one of the computers had developed an electromagnetic relay failure.
Some time later, that relay was investigated and a dead moth or bug was found, which caused that relay to be affected. Faced with the fact, Hopper left the bug taped to the logbook where the incident was recorded.
Image: Pixabay
do you still have doubts about what is a bug in programming?
how is a bug created?
To understand what a bug in programming is and how they are created, it is necessary to understand what is hardware and software, since it is in these two where the bug attacks directly.
According to the portal El Economista, “most bugs are caused by errors of those who develop the code of a software or system, when designing them or when they are not compatible with other programs or hardware”.
Some bugs in programming can be: inclusion of variables that were not initialized, bad indexing of tables in a database, creation of an infinite loop, use of fonts that are difficult to read or choice of colors that confuse users.
Ideally, when testing different types of software, the languages should organize the programming and typify the existing bugs so that the programmer can solve them.
Specialized software has also been created to recognize and solve computer bugs. Debuggers or debuggers, as these programs are known, analyze the program code and debug it by deleting each detected error.
After this, you know that even if there are no bugs inside your computer or hardware, you may have annoying “bugs” in the computer system, which prevent the correct operation of your programs.
types of bugs in programming
Now that you know what a programming bug is, we tell you that these computer faults, hated by programmers, are usually quite difficult to eliminate. And in order to deal with them, experts have classified them into groups according to their behavior. These are the most popular types of bugs:
Heisenbug
When you look up what a bug is in programming, one of the first types of code errors is the heisenbug. This has its origin in the well-known Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle: “the fact that every particle has a wave associated with it imposes restrictions on the ability to determine its position and velocity at the same time”.
Programmers refer to the heisenbug to refer to bugs that disappear or alter their behavior when trying to debug them. This occurs because the bug detects that you try to find the error with a bug debugging tool or program.
Bohrbug
These types of bugs, named after Bohr’s atomic model, are a type of error that is at the antipodes of the heisenbug. That is, they are computer bugs that maintain their behavior no matter what is done to eliminate it.
Mandelbug
This other variety of bugs are bugs with such complex causes that their behavior appears to be completely chaotic. Programmers named this bug after the fractal set discovered by Benoit Mendelbrot, a mathematical problem of great complexity.
Schroedinbugs
The name of this type of bug is related to the physicist Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, creator of the well-known “Schrödinger’s cat paradox”. In this case, the bug cannot be recognized until the programmer knows that it is there.
That is, they are bugs that do not appear until someone reads the code and discovers that, under certain circumstances, the program could fail thanks to the presence of the bug.
Image: Pixabay