The article says: "Clearly, that's not quite the same thing as the way debuggers are used today, but for Babbage he needed to debug prior to making the machine.

The article says: "Clearly, that's not quite the same thing as the way debuggers are used today, but for Babbage he needed to debug prior to making the machine. He was using a form of static analysis to ensure that a machine would work." Looking at the way he used it, it seems more akin to verification than debugging to me. Still, extremely fascinating! I've always wondered what would have happened if I time traveled back and gave Babbage a copy of Turing's Entscheidung paper. Or if he (together with the ravishing Lady Lovelace) traveled first to the 1950s, to get the basics of computer architecture, and then arrived at today. Would they be able to grasp it? I bet there are many steampunk novels on this very topic, any suggestions for what I should read?