OT, but things can also gradually turn from features into bugs, or --what the parent probably meant-- liabilities.

Not having an presice date for when something stopped being a useful feature does not prove it still is.

But I thought that your first statement was questionable, and that therefore your second statement was rather facile.

> Knuth's definition of 'bug' is a limited one, that seems to be mainly about logic errors. Allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document (which very few users actually wish to do in 2014) would be considered a bug in other typesetting software.

Certainly, people sometimes use "bug" loosely, but it seems to me there is a strict sense in which a "bug" means something that was not intended by the writer of the code. And the issue you describe clearly does not fit this description.

I would call what you describe a "design flaw", at best. But as I alluded to, it wasn't even a design flaw at the time it was introduced. So it's really more of an anachronism than anything else.

And again, it's not really clear that it's even an anachronism in TeX, since it's more of an issue with the DVI-to-PS (or DVI-to-PDF) transformation.

And then you went on to conclude, from this highly questionable chain of reasoning, that this "bug" is "a fantastic illustration of the gap between academic and industry concepts of computing". Which I just find galling. Here you're talking about one of the most celebrated computer scientists of all time, someone who is almost certainly a lot smarter than you (or I), and you chalk up a difference between what you and he call a bug to the difference between industry and academia. As if Knuth is just some kind of ivory-tower crackpot who wouldn't understand the real-world exigencies of industry.

So: I think your definition of "bug" is highly questionable, and I think that in the future, when you find yourself in disagreement with some celebrated academic computer scientist, you should perhaps linger a bit longer on the possibility that you might be mistaken, rather than chalking it all up to the difference between industry and academia.

You can't handle UTF 8, the default $LANG for almost every OS it is installed on? That's a bug. It needs to be fixed.

Your output quality is poor because it uses a custom font system that pushes users towards non-scalable fonts? That's a bug. It needs to be fixed.

Something not being a flaw at a time a piece of software was introduced is also irrelevant. Unmaintained software is generally considered to be poor software. While bitmap fonts were acceptable until the mid nineties, they really aren't now.

If you still think it's just me that holds these opinions, let's test it: try and argue for the 'strict' definition of bug outside academia and see how far you get.

I didn't criticise Knuth at all. I was fairly careful not to do that, and the original moderation on the comment (+3) reflected that. I merely note that academia simply works differently from industry.

I'm aware of Knuth and his contributions. I'm sure he's a lot better at computer science than I am. That doesn't mean he can't be questioned, and you finding it 'galling' seems very much to be a case of hero worship.

"I assumed that most of HN knew that", huh? This is the same kind of tendentious nonsense as "this is a fantastic illustration of the different between industry and academia".

Not only do I _not_ know that "the non-'strict' sense of bug is the one used by almost everyone in our industry", I don't think you know it either, because I think you're mistaken. (Maybe you're in a different industry than I am.) The people I deal with (in industry) regularly make distinctions between bugs, design flaws, and possible feature enhancements. And so do most issue trackers (e.g. GitHub, JIRA), for pete's sake. So I really don't think your use of "bug" as a catchall term for all of these things is universal at all, in industry or out of it.