{"id":60380,"date":"2026-04-14T10:39:02","date_gmt":"2026-04-14T05:09:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/officechai.com\/?p=60380"},"modified":"2026-04-14T10:39:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T05:09:20","slug":"why-dijkstra-didnt-want-programmers-to-use-the-term-bug","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/officechai.com\/stories\/why-dijkstra-didnt-want-programmers-to-use-the-term-bug\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Dijkstra Didn’t Want Programmers To Use The Term ‘Bug’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Programmers have called parts of their program that don’t quite work ‘bugs’ for decades, but a programming legend believed that this term wasn’t quite befitting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edsger W. Dijkstra \u2014 the Dutch computer scientist who gave the world Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm and helped lay the mathematical foundations of structured programming \u2014 had a pointed view on the language programmers use to describe their mistakes. In a lecture, he made a simple but sharp request: stop calling errors “bugs.” The word, he argued, wasn’t just imprecise. It was an act of evasion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“Having seen how we can convince ourselves that programs indeed are totally correct,” Dijkstra began<\/a>, “please realise that if you have written a program and it’s not correct, it is a little bit cowardly to call errors ‘bugs.'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He didn’t stop at calling it cowardly. He went further, diagnosing exactly why the word was dangerous:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“Calling errors ‘bugs’ is a very primitive, animistic attitude. It suggests that the bug has a life of its own, and that you’re not totally responsible for it. That the mean little bug crept in behind your back, at the moment you were not looking.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The image Dijkstra conjures is vivid and deliberate \u2014 the programmer as an innocent bystander, victimised by a creature that sneaked into their code unbidden. That framing, he insisted, was not just wrong but dishonest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“This is not true,” he said flatly. “If the program is not correct, you made an error.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His closing was a plea dressed as a demand:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

“My request \u2014 my prayer, so to speak \u2014 is that you stop using the term ‘bugs’ for program errors, but call them what they are: errors.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The distinction matters more than it might appear. When a program fails, calling it a “bug” subtly distributes the blame \u2014 to the machine, to chance, to some ambient chaos in the software universe. Calling it an error puts it squarely where Dijkstra believed it belonged: with the programmer. As he wrote elsewhere, the animistic metaphor of a bug maliciously sneaking in “while the programmer was not looking is intellectually dishonest, as it disguises that the error is the programmer’s own creation.” He also noted the practical consequence: a program with one “bug” used to be considered “almost correct,” but a program with an error<\/em> is simply wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not merely a semantic argument. It reflects Dijkstra’s broader conviction that programming is, at its core, a mathematical discipline \u2014 one that demands rigour, ownership, and intellectual honesty. He believed it was “not only the programmer’s responsibility to produce a correct program but also to demonstrate its correctness in a convincing manner.” Sloppy language, in his view, enabled sloppy thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The irony is that the industry has moved in the opposite direction. As AI coding tools<\/a> generate more and more of the code in production systems, the question of who owns an error becomes murkier, not clearer. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott has said that 95% of code will be AI-generated within five years, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested that 90% of coding could be done by AI within months. When a model writes the code, and it fails, is that a bug \u2014 or an error? And whose?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question isn’t academic. As AI software engineers<\/a> take on increasingly autonomous roles, there is a real risk that accountability dissolves entirely \u2014 hidden behind the very animism Dijkstra warned against, now upgraded from folklore to machine learning. Calling an AI’s faulty output a “hallucination” or a “bug” does the same rhetorical work as it always did: it lets someone off the hook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dijkstra’s prayer, it turns out, was not just about words. It was about whether programmers \u2014 and now the companies deploying AI in their place \u2014 are willing to own what they build.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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