No doubt, but crappy code today has a different structure. Damn kids.
The finder of the first bug was Captain (later Admiral) Grace Hopper. I once presented a paper at NCC the same time she did. Everyone went to her talk. I would rather have gone to her talk.
Gotos haven’t exactly been dropped - they have been tamed in the guise of loop exit statements.
Imagine the genome like a book. This book tells a story in coherent, grammatically correct sentences (the genes). Only 10% of the book is devoted to these sentences; the rest of the book is random letters, gibberish, mispelled words, and sentence fragments (repetitive sequence, degenerated intergenic padding, and pseudogenes). Also, the coherent sentences can sometimes be interrupted by random letters and gibberish and still work (like splicing of genes) – kind of like GOTO statements. Sometimes whole sentences are nested in between these splices.
Worse yet is sometimes the sentences are ambiguous. Let’s think of something like “It is in the library.” To understand what they really mean, you have to look at the gibberish for clues. For instance, maybe there are the words “book on Alabama” a little before the sentence, which now means that there is a book on Alabama in the library. These are like regulatory regions.
Now you know as much about genetics as you ever need to know. What I term “junk DNA” are not the genes, the regulatory regions, the splice sites, or things required for chromatin organization or global control. I refer to the stuff under absolutely no functional constraint – the stuff with no evolutionary function which is freely mutating without any selective advantage or disadvantage. There’s a shitload of these, and we have genomic tests to test whether sequence is “junk” or not.
There are as many ways to break a gene as there are to mess up a sentence. Insert a few words, a few letters. Break it in half. Change the regulatory regions so it is misexpressed or not expressed at all (“book on Alabama” to “ook on Alaba” for instance). Mess with the splicing. One especially sees this with pseudogenes, which can and do cause aberrant splicing, misexpression, and even transpositions so that pieces of the pseudogenes are now spliced into genes. But the vast majority of junk DNA is not doing anything. It is just sitting there, mutating. It isn’t performing hidden function. 40% of the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome is repetitive. There are over 1.4 million estimated copies of one 300 basepair element called an Alu repeat. And repetitive sequence is only one kind of junk DNA.