The OP was originally published by Baggett on Quora, and then subsequently re-published on Gamasutra. The Quora posting has a few footnotes, including him admitting that "quantum mechanics" was mostly a flourish. What he meant was, that unlike other software bugs, "the behavior was -- at least at the level of the source code -- non-deterministic"
A few people have pointed out that this bug really wasn't a product of quantum mechanical effects, any more than any other bug is. Of course I was being hyperbolic mentioning quantum mechanics. But this bug did feel different to me, in that the behavior was -- at least at the level of the source code -- non-deterministic.
Some people have said I should have taken more electronics classes. That is absolutely true; I consider myself a "full stack" programmer, but my stack really only goes down to hand-writing assembly code, not to playing with transistors. Perhaps some day I will learn more about the "bare metal"...
Finally, a few have questioned whether a better development methodology would have prevented this kind of bug in the first place. I don't think so, but it's possible. I use test-driven development for some coding tasks these days, but it's doubtful we could have usefully applied these techniques given the constraints of the systems and tools we were using.
http://www.quora.com/Whats-the-hardest-bug-youve-debugged
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Footnotes for posterity:
A few people have pointed out that this bug really wasn't a product of quantum mechanical effects, any more than any other bug is. Of course I was being hyperbolic mentioning quantum mechanics. But this bug did feel different to me, in that the behavior was -- at least at the level of the source code -- non-deterministic.
Some people have said I should have taken more electronics classes. That is absolutely true; I consider myself a "full stack" programmer, but my stack really only goes down to hand-writing assembly code, not to playing with transistors. Perhaps some day I will learn more about the "bare metal"...
Finally, a few have questioned whether a better development methodology would have prevented this kind of bug in the first place. I don't think so, but it's possible. I use test-driven development for some coding tasks these days, but it's doubtful we could have usefully applied these techniques given the constraints of the systems and tools we were using.