

Babbage's Debugger - jgrahamc
http://blog.jgc.org/2010/09/babbages-debugger.html

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Jun8
The article says: "Clearly, that's not quite the same thing as the way
debuggers are used today, but for Babbage he needed to debug prior to making
the machine. He was using a form of static analysis to ensure that a machine
would work."

Looking at the way he used it, it seems more akin to verification than
debugging to me. Still, extremely fascinating! I've always wondered what would
have happened if I time traveled back and gave Babbage a copy of Turing's
Entscheidung paper. Or if he (together with the ravishing Lady Lovelace)
traveled first to the 1950s, to get the basics of computer architecture, and
then arrived at today. Would they be able to grasp it?

I bet there are many steampunk novels on this very topic, any suggestions for
what I should read?

~~~
gjm11
Not quite what you're looking for, but <http://2dgoggles.com/> has a very
witty but also very irregularly updated cartoonified steampunk
Babbage/Lovelace story.

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zeteo
That's not a debugger, it's a high-level programming language.

