alt Hacker NewsTIL gremlins weren’t just used to explain mysterious mechanical failures in airplanes, it’s the origin story of the term ‘gremlin’ itself[0].
I had always assumed there was some previous use of the term, neat!
Replies
ricochet11 • today at 4:53 AM
Wow fascinating I’d have thought they were a lot older.
So the word is actually semantically very close to "bug"! I guess we could still be using it, but the word's just too long for something that is one of the most used terms in software development.
At this point, picking that specific word is not at all a random quirk, as it's using the word literally like it's originally intended to be used.