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In recent years i've noticed a trend for people, including some native speakers of English, to say that a piece of software is âbuggedâ - by which they mean, âhas a bug, or bugsâ.
i struggle with this, because for most of my life, âbuggedâ has referred to something being under surveillance via surveillance equipment - for example, âThe room was bugged by the intelligence serviceâ. So what i (and many other people) would instead say is something like âThis piece of software is buggyâ (or perhaps just âThis is softwareâ, because the amount of software that doesn't contain bugs is vanishingly small[a], which i say as a dev myself).
This might be less of a Big Deal if it weren't for the fact that a significant part of the world is living under either surveillance capitalism, or a surveillance state, or both. Even setting aside social media platforms like Meta's, which have surveillance-for-advertising-purposes as their primary business model, software in general is increasingly moving towards âphoning homeâ to provide âtelemetryâ about how people are using it, and in what contexts - purely âto help improve the softwareâ, of course, with no chance of such data ever getting used outside of that. (Since acquisitions and mergers and data leaks / exfiltrations never happen.) VSCode is one example; VSCodium is the version without telemetry/tracking[b]. And in 2021, there was the stoush around the possibility of telemetry being added to the Audacity audio editing software, after the project was acquired by Muse Group[c].
Given this, i'm trying to discourage people from using the word âbuggedâ to mean âhas a bug, or bugsâ. In specific contexts, it might be clear what's meant, but given the general trajectory of software towards being increasingly user-hostile[d] (including compilers![e]), it can also create unnecessary ambiguity. Since there's an existing word, âbuggyâ, that conveys what's meant without the ambiguity, why not use it?
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đˇ ict,language
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[a] Famously, legendary computer scientist Don Knuth once wrote in a memo:
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
-- âKnuth: Frequently Asked Questionsâ
[c] Wikipedia: âAudacity (audio editor)â / âReceptionâ
[d] âThe Rise of User-Hostile Softwareâ (2021)
[e] âC and C++ Prioritize Performance over Correctnessâ (2023)