50 Fun Facts About Software Engineering

Which leader of Apollo's flight-software team at MIT is credited with coining the term 'software engineering'?

Margaret Hamilton used the phrase so that software would be taken as seriously as hardware engineering. In 2016 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her Apollo work.

Which insect did operators tape into the logbook of Harvard's Mark II computer in 1947 as an actual 'bug'?

A moth trapped in a relay had caused the fault, and the operators noted it as the first real case of a bug being found. The logbook, insect included, is now in the Smithsonian.

Which desk companion gives its name to the debugging habit of explaining code aloud, line by line?

A rubber duck comes from a story in the book The Pragmatic Programmer about a research assistant who carried one around to explain his problems to. Saying each step aloud often exposes the mistake.

Which Pixar film was almost lost in 1998 when an accidental delete command erased most of its files?

Toy Story 2 survived because technical director Galyn Susman, working from home with a newborn, had a copy on her home computer. The studio's own backups had been failing for about a month.

Guido van Rossum named which programming language after a British comedy troupe he enjoyed watching?

Python honors Monty Python's Flying Circus, not the snake. Its tutorials often use 'spam' and 'eggs' as example names in tribute to one of the troupe's sketches.

The agile framework Scrum, with its sprints and daily stand-ups, borrows its name from which sport?

Rugby inspired a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper that compared fast product teams to a side moving upfield together, handing the ball from player to player.

NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 because two pieces of software disagreed about what?

Measurement units were the culprit: Lockheed Martin's ground software reported thruster impulse in pound-force seconds, while NASA's navigation software expected newton-seconds.

Which daughter of the poet Lord Byron is often called the first computer programmer?

Ada Lovelace described how Charles Babbage's unbuilt Analytical Engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, a method often called the first published computer program.

Which software scare arose because many older programs stored each year using only its last two digits?

The Y2K bug meant the year 2000 could be mistaken for 1900. Preparing for it is estimated to have cost more than $300 billion worldwide.

Tux, the official mascot of the Linux kernel, is which kind of animal?

A penguin was the idea of Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who joked that he caught 'penguinitis' after one nibbled him at a zoo in Canberra, Australia.

Linus Torvalds named which version-control system, begun in 2005, after British slang for an unpleasant person?

Git was Torvalds's joke at his own expense: he said he names all his projects after himself. He built it after the Linux kernel lost free use of the BitKeeper tool.

Which two-word greeting became every beginner's first program thanks to the 1978 book The C Programming Language?

Hello, world spread from a sample program by Brian Kernighan, whose earliest known version appears in his 1972 tutorial for the B language.

Which European rocket destroyed itself 37 seconds into its 1996 maiden flight after a software number overflow?

Ariane 5 reused guidance code written for its predecessor, and converting a 64-bit number into a 16-bit integer overflowed, shutting down the inertial navigation system.

Seventeen developers wrote the Agile Manifesto in 2001 at a ski resort in which US state?

Utah's Snowbird resort hosted the meeting, whose manifesto prizes working software over comprehensive documentation and responding to change over following a plan.

Kanban boards, used by software teams to track work in progress, grew out of which carmaker's production system?

Toyota built its just-in-time system in the late 1940s to produce only what customers demanded. Kanban is Japanese for signboard.

Ward Cunningham coined which term in 1992 for the future cost of taking coding shortcuts today?

Technical debt was Cunningham's way of explaining to his boss why a financial product needed reworking: shortcuts, like loans, have to be paid back later.

The authors of the influential 1994 book Design Patterns are collectively known by which nickname?

The Gang of Four are Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides, whose book catalogued 23 classic patterns for object-oriented code.

Which adage says a software system's design will mirror the communication structure of the team that built it?

Conway's law was put forward by programmer Melvin Conway in 1967 as an observation about organizations, and is now applied mainly to software architecture.

Computer scientist Tony Hoare called which of his own 1965 inventions a 'billion-dollar mistake'?

The null reference, a value that points at nothing, was added to the ALGOL W language and went on to become one of the most common sources of software crashes.

A hidden credit in the 1980 Atari game Adventure gave rise to which term for a secret tucked into software?

Easter egg was coined at Atari after programmer Warren Robinett hid his own name in a secret room, because the company would not credit its game designers.

Fred Brooks argued that adding programmers to a late project only delays it further in which 1975 book?

The Mythical Man-Month drew on Brooks's time managing IBM's OS/360, where newcomers needed time to learn the project and every extra person multiplied the lines of communication.

Which business programming language, designed in 1959 to read like English, grew out of Grace Hopper's FLOW-MATIC?

COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, took shape after a Pentagon meeting in May 1959, with Hopper serving as a technical adviser to the committee.

Brendan Eich wrote the first version of which web programming language in ten days at Netscape in 1995?

JavaScript began life as Mocha, then became LiveScript, before taking its final name in December 1995 in a joint announcement with Sun Microsystems.

Which programming question-and-answer site, launched in 2008, had its name chosen in a vote by blog readers?

Stack Overflow was created by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, and the readers who voted on its name followed Atwood's programming blog, Coding Horror.

The Therac-25, whose software race conditions caused fatal overdoses in the 1980s, was what kind of medical device?

A radiotherapy machine built by Atomic Energy of Canada, it dropped the hardware safety interlocks of earlier models and trusted software checks alone. It is now a standard case study in software safety.

Which 2014 security bug in the widely used OpenSSL library was given its own logo and website?

Heartbleed was named and branded by a Finnish security firm, bleeding-heart logo included. The flaw itself was a missing bounds check in a 'heartbeat' feature.

Which military alliance sponsored the first conference on software engineering in 1968?

NATO held the conference in the Alpine town of Garmisch and a follow-up in Rome a year later; their two reports set out how software ought to be developed.

Software teams that use their own unfinished product every day are said to be eating what?

Their own dog food became tech jargon after a 1988 Microsoft email titled 'Eating our own Dogfood' urged more internal use of the company's own networking product.

Which grimly named measure counts how many key people a project could suddenly lose before stalling?

Bus factor comes from asking what happens if a key colleague is hit by a bus. It is also known as the lottery factor, a cheerier way of losing someone.

Six women, including Kay McNulty and Betty Snyder, were the original programmers of which early American computer?

ENIAC's programmers were picked from at least 200 women employed as human 'computers', yet most of them were not invited to the machine's 50th anniversary event.

Which country officially recognized the Day of the Programmer, the 256th day of the year, in 2009?

Russia's decree was signed by President Dmitry Medvedev. The date was picked because 256 is the number of distinct values a single byte can hold.

Winston Royce's 1970 diagram of strictly sequential phases became the basis of which software development model?

Waterfall was never Royce's own word for it, and he drew the strictly one-way version as a flawed process that needed feedback between its stages.

In pair programming, one developer types as the 'driver' while the partner reviewing each line is called what?

The navigator, also called the observer, watches for mistakes and thinks about the direction of the work while the driver types. The two swap roles often.

Richard Stallman's free-software project GNU has a recursive name declaring that it is not which operating system?

Unix was the model for GNU's design, but the project Stallman announced in 1983 contains none of its code and was written to be free for anyone to share.

Tangled, unstructured source code with a convoluted control flow is nicknamed after which pasta?

Spaghetti code spawned a menu of spin-off insults, among them lasagna code, whose layers are so intertwined that changing one means changing the others.

Which airliner was grounded worldwide in 2019 after its MCAS flight-control software was linked to two fatal crashes?

Boeing 737 MAX pilots were not told about MCAS at first: regulators had approved the maker's request to leave the system out of the flight manual.

For about a decade, each major Android release carried a codename taken from which kind of food?

Desserts supplied Android's names from Cupcake in 2009 through Pie, before Google announced in 2019 that it would switch to plain numbers.

Which author of The Art of Computer Programming long paid $2.56 to readers who found errors in his books?

Donald Knuth chose the sum because 256 pennies make one 'hexadecimal dollar', and his reward checks became some of computing's most prized trophies.

Thousands of projects broke in 2016 when a developer deleted left-pad, a package of roughly how many lines of code?

Just 11 lines, which padded text with extra characters, sat inside software used by Facebook, Netflix and Spotify until their author pulled his packages in a naming dispute.

Martin Fowler's 1999 handbook popularized which practice of restructuring working code without changing its behavior?

Refactoring proceeds as a series of tiny standard changes, each of which leaves the program's results the same, so that a design improves without anything breaking.

Bjarne Stroustrup's language C++ started life in 1979 under which plainer working name?

C with Classes was renamed in 1983 after the ++ operator, which adds one to a value in C, to signal a step forward from the older language.

Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language in the early 1970s at which American research lab?

Bell Labs got C as the successor to an earlier language simply called B, and its researchers went on to rewrite the kernel of their own operating system in it.

A software clock drifting by a third of a second made which US missile system miss a Scud in 1991?

Patriot batteries lost timing accuracy the longer they ran, and the one at Dhahran had been switched on for 100 hours when the Scud hit a barracks, killing 28 soldiers.

Arthur C. Clarke said history's costliest hyphen doomed which Venus-bound NASA probe in 1962?

Mariner 1 was blown up on a range safety officer's order when its rocket strayed off course. The missing character was really an overline in a guidance formula.

Which US trading firm lost over $400 million in about 45 minutes in 2012 through a botched software rollout?

Knight Capital's new code was never copied to one of its eight servers, where leftover defective code fired off millions of unintended stock orders. The firm was sold within months.

The word 'wiki', which Ward Cunningham chose for the first user-editable website, means 'quick' in which language?

Hawaiian came to mind because an airport employee in Honolulu had once told Cunningham to take the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, a bus that runs between the terminals.

MIT programmers named background processes 'daemons' after which scientist's imaginary molecule-sorting demon?

Maxwell's demon, a thought experiment from thermodynamics, suited programs that toil unseen on system chores. The name was coined at MIT's Project MAC around 1963.

Christine Peterson suggested which term in 1998 as a more business-friendly label for free software?

Open source was meant to end confusion over the word 'free', which can mean both freedom and zero price. The Open Source Initiative was founded the same year.

Apollo's flight software was stored in 'core rope memory', which factory workers made by doing what to wires?

Weaving them through and around tiny magnetic cores fixed the program in place, so the bulk of the software could not be changed once a mission was under way.

Software fixes are called patches because early programmers physically spliced corrections into which storage medium?

Paper tape was literally cut and rejoined: suppliers sent out a replacement segment, and the recipient cut the faulty stretch from the original and patched in the new one.