When 19th-century inventors and engineers started using bug as a synonym for defect, they were talking about mechanical malfunctions, and mechanical malfunctions were always bad. The idea that a bug might actually be something desirable would never have crossed the mind of an Edison or a Tesla. It was only after the word entered the vocabulary of coders that it got slippery. It's not a bug, it's a feature is an acknowledgment, half comic, half tragic, of the ambiguity that has always haunted computer programming.
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