Machines are simple: a hammer, a door hinge, a steak knife. Systems are much more complicated; they have components, feedback loops, mean times between failure, infrastructure. Digital systems are daedal; even a simple computer program has hundreds of thousands of lines of computer code doing all sorts of different things. A complex computer program has thousands of components, each of which has to work by itself and in interaction with all the other components. This is why object-oriented programming was developed: to deal with the complexity of digital systems...systems have bugs. A bug is a particular kind of failure...It's different from a malfunction. When something malfunctions, it no longer works properly. When something has a bug, it misbehaves in a particular way, possibly unrepeatable, and possibly unexplainable. Bugs are unique to systems. Machines can break, or fail, or not work, but only a system can have a bug.
