Bugged out
“The Bug” author Ellen Ullman talks about the Gothic terrors that lurk between the rational lines of computer code: https://www.salon.com/2003/05/16/ullman_4/
I like the idea of Gothic for stories of life with computers - we build intricate systems and they horrify us. The new prometheus.
The Salon piece was an interesting read. “She does full justice to the highs and lows of the programming life – as both an unnatural punishment for the human organism and an invigorating challenge to the human brain.”
I think the history of software engineering is trying to find a way to write reliable code and miserably failing, year after year. It wouldn’t be a perennial topic in software engineering if anyone had any idea how to fix the problem of bugs.
